Agenda - 12-15-2009 - 3b - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

24 MENTAL HEALTH TASK FORCE REPORT Published Sun, Mar 04,,.2007 Lynn Bonner-Staff Writer Scarcity of mental-health care traps patients in vicious cycle In the days when mental patients were put away, the symbol of the state mental hospital was a locked door. Now in North Carolina, it's a revolving one. Mental patients are rapidly cycling in and out of the state's four mental institutions. Those checking in for stays of one to seven days increased more than 82 percent from 2001 to 2005. Many are admitted multiple times. Federal investigators are reviewing the turnover. They found a woman in her 40s being treated at Dorothea Dix last year who was in the Raleigh hospital for the 60th time and overall has been admitted to state mental hospitals more than 100 times. A woman at Broughton Hospital in Morganton last year was being treated there for the 78th time. Changes at the. local level are driving the high admissions rate. Counties are offering fewer mental-health services, and community hospitals are increasingly reluctant to set aside beds for psychiatric patients. When people suffer amental- health crisis, the state hospitals are often the only choice. The hospitals cannot force stable patients to stay and often lack room to accommodate those who want to remain. For some, the turnover is too fast. Some kill themselves shortly after being released. Others turn up in jails, homeless shelters, drug treatment programs or emergency rooms. Mental-health care in North Carolina wasn't supposed to work this way. Under changes made in 2001, more people were supposed to be treated in community hospitals, special crisis centers or at home. In many places, those community services have been slow to appear. "If you overwhelm a system beyond its point of capacity, it can't do everything it needs to do," said Dr. Jeffrey Geller, a psychiatrist from the University of Massachusetts medical school who is monitoring the hospitals for the federal government. Geller is working for the state and the U.S. Department of Justice, reviewing hospital practices and procedures. His work is part of a federal investigation of the four state psychiatric hospitals: Dorothea Dix, John Umstead in Butner, Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro and Broughton. Geller's review of Broughton's records last year found several cases in which patients killed themselves after hospital stays of a few days or weeks. He said hospital records on those patients were not up to standard. Among the cases was that of a 33-year-old woman from Union County who was admitted in November 2005.On her chart, a psychiatrist wrote that the patient "planned to take too many pills to kill herself. She is clearly a danger to herself." She was released after two days and killed herself three days later with a drug overdose. A 33-yeaz-old Watauga woman shot herself about six weeks after leaving Broughton. And Jerry Rodrique Love, a 36-yeaz-old Charlotte man, hanged himself five days after spending two days in the hospital. "I don't think he did get the help he needed," said his mother, Gail Love. Jerry Love, whom friends and family called "Dreky," was diagnosed at the hospital with severe depression. His mother said he drank too much and abused drugs but had tried many times to break the habits. Jerry Love asked hospital staff to keep him, his mother said, and he asked her to send him a coat, thinking he would be at Broughton for a while. But Love was back home before his coat got to him. "His dying like he did -- to send him back [out] -- I'm still struggling," Gail Love said. In and out -and back in Of about 17,000 people admitted to the state hospitals in 2005, more than 1,400 were admitted for a second time within a month. About 2,600 returned within six months. 22