Why put off until tomorrow what you can do five years from now?
That’s the question posed by the settlement of a lawsuit in the great state of New Jersey. Imagine being cleared to be discharged out of an inpatient psychiatric hospital, only you have no …
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It’s had to celebrate any announcement from New Jersey especially where so many individuals will continue to experience more years of unnecessary hospitalization. In 2005, persons with mental illnesses looked forward to the promise of 10,000 new housing opportunities funded by NJ’s Special Needs Housing Trust Fund yet it will likely create only 2,000. NJ committed itself to implementing the principles of “Wellness & Recovery” system wide yet we find that its largest state psychiatric hospital, Ancora, is the subject of a US Department of Justice CRIPA investigation.
What our nation’s mental health system so often represents that it will achieve sometime in the distant future is too often absent from the subsequent reality. New shiboleths and salesman’s puffery – Era of Psychosocial Rehabilitation, Era of Evidence-based Practices, Era of Wellness & Recovery – can’t be substitutes for measurable achievements as reflected in the lives of those who were promised real change.
[Consider SAMHSA's "10 x 10" initiative which was announced almost two years ago. It's expressed goal is to reduce consumer mortality by ten years in ten years. I wonder if anything has been achieved?]
New Jersey is likely to see more violence and suicide in 5 years.