A very recent article, Colorado Still Lacks Inpatient Psychiatric Care by Ms. Elizabeth Drew published May 10, 2016 documents the same kinds of problems with psychiatric acute inpatient treatment resources that many other states have faced around the USA for the last 15 to 20 years.
Ms. Drew highlights the backdrop that started the mental health reform effort in Colorado so suddenly and starkly. Colorado suffered the misfortune to have the two double tragedies of mass shootings, the Columbine High School tragedy a number of years ago and the more recent Aurora CO theater shootings of 2012 committed by the then clearly psychotic James Holmes, whose trial riveted the nation. The James Holmes shooting caused a huge outcry from the public in that state for major and thoroughgoing changes in mental health services’ delivery.
Colorado has closed two state hospitals due to aging facilities being shut down and not being replaced. Colorado ranks now well below the current statistical average of 14 or so (13.9 in the previous blog posting’s article) per 100,000 beds for public inpatient psychiatric care in the state. Like many other states, its public mental health system has suffered greatly in the past two decades with inadequate funding and lack of growth of services commensurate with its higher than national average population growth. And like many other states, tragedies have begun to ramp up in severity, frequency and publicity as the “chickens have come home to roost.”
This article describes the very ambitious and quite rapid changes in point of fact, that Colorado put into place just last year, only about three years or so after the Aurora theater shooting. A massive state-wide system of acute outpatient crisis centers and much more rapid access to mental health contact, screenings and referrals to treatment resources was put in place. This clearly had a positive effect. Admirably, Colorado has begun a serious open effort to evaluate only one year into the operation of its new system. The results have been mixed and no matter what criticisms or kudos one may choose to endorse. Colorado, in my opinion as a long-time observer of mental health reform efforts nationwide, had commendable courage to permit and undertake this open review process. This review effort, documented in Ms. Drew’s article appears to show two results if I may condense and categorize them: 1) positive results in the delivery of acute mostly outpatient services, and 2) the common bugaboo of the yet unaddressed shortage of acute inpatient hospital beds seen now almost everywhere. Ms. Drew succinctly summarizes the reasons for this as relating to loss and closure of state hospital psychiatric beds and facilities, and, inadequate funding at the state and federal levels of the riddle of the expense of inpatient psychiatric hospital based treatment. [In a coming post I will try my psychiatric hand at explaining why inpatient psychiatric treatment is always expensive].
In coming posts, I will try my psychiatric hand at enumerating other issues common to all states beyond hospital beds that make the current mental health delivery crisis so severe. These issues will include the shortage of mental health professionals especially psychiatrists and the history of some more discrete and largely unknown to the public, mental health training fund losses that have caused our current severe practitioner shortages.
The Mental Health Reform Blog 