Most folks reading our blog know the long disturbing history of how we have gotten to such a sad place in the US in our treatment of people with serious mental illnesses. You may find it interesting, as I did, to learn that President Reagan made a major change (see below), which resulted in diminished community resources.
“That began to change shortly after Ronald Regan was elected president in 1980. He ended earmarking of federal funds for this system of community mental health centers and instead substituted block grants to the states that they could use at their discretion. Almost all the states acted badly, cutting taxes rather than using the federal funding as before for community mental health.”
We need a federal plan that also involves the removal of the IMD exclusion. This mental health treatment exclusion is a parity violation. There is no such restriction on the length of stay or the number of medical beds in hospitals for medical conditions. Learn more about parity laws.
We need to focus on the people with SMI and not just general mental health!!
ACMI Board
Original article published by StatNews on July 9th by Allen Frances
President Biden’s ambitious infrastructure plan has a glaring omission: It makes no effort to redress the awful reality that the United States has the worst mental health infrastructure of any country in the developed world.
People with mental illness, their families, and society at large are suffering the tragic consequences of four decades of mental health defunding and privatization: 90% of psychiatric beds have been closed; the once-wonderful system of publicly funded community mental health centers has been gutted; crisis response teams are almost nonexistent; and the available pool of affordable housing meets only a fraction of what’s needed.
In the Middle Ages, people with severe mental illness were often chained in prisons, begged on the street, or languished in poor houses. In modern America, 350,000 people with mental illness are in jails or prisons (often for nuisance crimes that could easily have been avoided had treatment been available); 250,000 of them are homeless; and the average life span of those with severe mental illness is 20 years less than that of the general population. The rate of dying from Covid-19 was three time higher among people with schizophrenia than in the general community — the second biggest risk factor after age.
Law enforcement officers, sheriffs, and judges have become the most vocal critics of the brutal criminalization of mental illness and are now among the strongest advocates for improved community treatment and housing. Forcing scared and untrained police officers to be first responders for people with untreated mental illness puts them in untenable positions and is partly responsible for police brutality and shootings. People with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to die during a police encounter than other civilians.
And once in jail, people with mental health issues are difficult to manage, deteriorate further, spend disproportionate time in solitary confinement, and have prolonged stays (especially since they have no place to go and no treatment if released).
How did the U.S. get into this mess? Massive and rapid deinstitutionalization of people with mental health issues began in the late 1950s for several reasons: partly because effective antipsychotics had been discovered; partly as a humanitarian response to the horrors of the overcrowded “snake pit” state psychiatric hospitals; partly as a cost-cutting method (since mental health was often the biggest and most tempting item in state budgets).
The “new approach to mental illness” that President John F. Kennedy called for in a 1963 speech, which resulted in his signing into law the Community Mental Health Centers Act later that year, was a response to the great disruption caused by the rapid closure of the huge state hospitals. Community services were meant to provide a better life for people with mental illness at less cost to the states.
My first job working in a community mental health center in 1973 in New York City was thrilling. Patients who had languished for decades in state hospitals were able to enjoy much more normal lives with the benefits of medication and inclusion in the community. The U.S. became the world leader in community psychiatry and I was proud to be a psychiatrist.
That began to change shortly after Ronald Regan was elected president in 1980. He ended earmarking of federal funds for this system of community mental health centers and instead substituted block grants to the states that they could use at their discretion. Almost all the states acted badly, cutting taxes rather than using the federal funding as before for community mental health.
And the money saved by closing the expensive state psychiatric hospitals rarely followed patients into their communities to provide badly needed treatment and housing. Community mental services either closed or were privatized, and the newly private services routinely refused care to people with severe mental illness because they were usually uninsured and always very expensive to treat.
Eventually, deinstitutionalization turned into reinstitutionalization as prisons replaced hospitals as the biggest line item in state budgets. Under Reagan, the U.S. quickly went from having the best system of community psychiatric care in the world to the worst, and things have further deteriorated ever since.
It is not clear how much of Biden’s extensive physical and human infrastructure rebuilding plan will eventually be enacted into law. But it is crystal clear that rebuilding our country’s shamefully lacking mental health system is not part of the plan.
It is also clear why. Powerful lobbying forces in Washington are fiercely jostling to capture the money allocated to the infrastructure program. Whatever emerges will reflect how much political and economic muscle each industry can exert on the politicians doing the horse trading. In this battle of the titans, people with mental illness are voiceless and their advocacy groups lack political and economic muscle.
The care of people with severe mental illness is necessarily a public responsibility that has been neglected in our primarily for-profit private health care system. The United States has shirked this public responsibility more than any other developed nation on earth. The Biden plan is a sad lost opportunity to play catch-up on desperately needed mental health services and its exclusion of mental health means there is no hope in sight.
Mahatma Gandhi once said that a nation’s greatness is judged by how it treats its weakest members. By this standard, the United States is morally bankrupt and the very opposite of great.
Allen Frances is a psychiatrist, professor and chair emeritus of the Duke University Department of Psychiatry, and was chair of the DSM-IV Task Force from 1987 to 1994.
You must be logged in to post a comment.