ITP Ordered Inmates Continue to Take up Needed State Hospital Psychiatric Beds

State hospitals around the country are being flooded with referrals from local and state criminal courts. These patients are almost always chronically mentally ill who have committed mostly minor crimes including breaking and entering, theft, trafficking in stolen goods, assaults, trespassing etc. They are often not being actively followed by area mental health agencies and kept on their (usually antipsychotic and/or antimanic medications for a variety of reasons. Many of them have the characteristic of disbelieving they have mental illness and go off their medications rapidly This is a discussion for another day but it shows perhaps the most glaring deficiency in the outpatient care of the mentally ill today. We have no true old-fashioned public health organized outreach for these patients as we did in past eras, legislatively mandated (read court ordered) means of tracking these patients with mobile public health workers who make sure they take and stay on their long-acting injectable antipsychotics and stay symptom-controlled. We did this in the age of Typhoid March and in the era of getting syphilis under control as well as the national such treatment approaches to tuberculosis.

Nowadays “outpatient patient commitment” for such enforced treatment is at best limited and indeed laughable. Most such outpatient commitments, legal orders to comply with receiving their needed “LAI’s” last only 90 days and then patient in the majority of this population nationwide, absent themselves from follow-up, ending up back in state hospitals, in the jails where they become symptomatic. Jails are not in any shape or form psychiatric treatment facilities. Smaller jails in small counties and towns, have no psychiatric practitioners of any level of training, nor almost always a local community hospital with an inpatient psychiatric service.

So what happens is that these inmate patients gets petitioned by their defense attorneys or presiding judges to be sent to the local state hospitals, which often in the case in the big sparsely populated western states, the only state psychiatric hospitals, and invariably hundreds of miles from their communities of origin. They are called in most states, “ITP’s,” or “incompetent to proceed,” since they are mostly psychotic and cannot rationally aid their own defense attorneys.

The article in the Casper newspaper details succinctly that almost logarithmic meteoric rise in the number of ITP service requests the hospital has had to content within the last 115-17 years.

I will depart from my usual style and quote the author of the article since it deftly summarizes the ever escalating numbers of mentally ill in jails now requiring these services all across the country.

“In the fiscal year 2015, the hospital performed 232 competency evaluations for the courts — more than double the amount in 2000, according to data from the hospital. Between fiscal years 2000 and 2004, the hospital completed an average of 131 forensic evaluations per year. Between fiscal years 2011 and 2015, the hospital performed an average of 193 annually.

State hospitals now are variously estimated to have approximately 25% of their public inpatient state hospital beds occupied by the ITP population. It often takes months to both treat in conventional manner these persons’ active psychosis and then months longer to put them through standardized curriculum to fully educate them about the in’s and out’s of the legal system, their charges, how to deport themselves in court and above all the actively participate in their own defense when they return to trial.