Texas, like many states, has been struggling for the better part of the last two decades with its public mental health system’s needs. Like almost all other states in the United States, it has seen its share of declining state funding for state-wide mental health services. Ageing state hospitals for the acutely mentally ill, chronically mentally ill and developmentally disabled have been closed or downsized. Short-falls have gradually appeared in the provision of outpatient services recommended and hoped for, to supplement or replace those reduced state hospital beds.
Texas for a number of years has begun to experience the enormous increase in jail populations of the mentally ill, mirroring many other states, especially New York with its travails at Rikers Island, perhaps the country’s most famous metropolitan jail facility, serving New York City. Rikers Island has lamentably been in the tragedy borne headlines in the last few years with repeated suicides of mentally ill inmates, and lawsuits by families and repeated efforts at reform and improvement, recently occurring again by necessity under the mayoralty of Bill DeBlasio.
Harris County Jail, of Houston Texas, has become known as one of the largest “psychiatric” facilities in the country. Several years ago I recall that the Harris County Jail had to increase its psychiatrist staff roster from three psychiatrists to fifteen and add a number of psychiatric physician extenders and other staff to serve the needs of this swelling psychiatric segment of the inmate population. What happened in Harris County, encompassing metropolitan Houston, was not unique to the country’s correctional systems at all, but became known readily nationwide as one of the first such settings recognized for this tell-tale barometer of the deficiencies in any area’s public mental health service system. Harris County, on a personal note, is known quite well to me, as that extended area was where my father came from and is where I have my only sibling living all our adult lives.
A very recent article online written by Stephen M. Glazier, one of the nation’s leading mental health care executives and head of UTHealth Harris County Psychiatric Center of Houston, outlined one of the best-written definitions of the concept of psychiatric “continuum of care,” that I have ever read. His article appearing at TribTalk.org, “Bridging the Mental Health Treatment Gap,” on May 9, 2016, provided insight into Texas’ progressive efforts in just the last 1-2 years on improving the state’s mental health reform and care delivery efforts which have not received the recognition they deserve.
Mr. Glazier pointed out the common issue seen in many states who have had to face the need to close or replace aging state hospitals, and the multifaceted dilemmas of what to replace them with. He eloquently wrote of the concept of providing what he termed the middle range of less intensive residential and non-hospital based psychiatric services in the overall continuum from hospital to home or ultimate living placement for the mentally ill person. He delineated some key concepts and facts: 1) that Texas’ state psychiatric bed ratio has declined since 2001 from 13.4 beds per 100,000 persons to 10.9; and that, 2) even if Texas had ‘kept up’ with the growing mental health needs, the rapid growth population growth in the state of Texas, which has always been in the top five states in the US, the state’s level of services would still have fallen behind previous levels of beds per 100,000 population.
His idea is not a new one, that increased and nuanced provision of these middle ground “residential,” transitional psychiatric services, would to at least some degree, not only replace some state hospital beds, but reduce the spill-over, or “trans-institutionalizations,” (the new buzzword) that we are seeing as ever more rapidly increasing numbers of the seriously mentally ill, shift from non-existent state psychiatric hospital beds to jails, hospital ERs, and the streets and shelters, all never intended to serve this population. But Mr. Glazier’s description of what is needed in filling in the gaps in the continuum of care of the mentally ill is well worth reading.
The Mental Health Reform Blog 