Category: incapable to proceed to trial patients

USA’s Competency to Stand Trial Problem

A December 2017 article, entitled: “Colorado to spend $20 million to relieve ongoing backlog of mental competency evaluations; critics say problem was foreseeable,“  in the Denver Post newspaper and recently reprised highlighted what has been a national crisis in the psychiatric inpatient care delivery system for at least the past decade.

Colorado’s problem has continued to balloon up so persistently that the article stated: “[the]State can’t keep up with monthly court orders for competency evaluation, which jumped from 146 to 215” swamping the entire state hospital bed capability. And as has happened in every other state, the regular emergent psychiatric admissions to the state’s public psychiatric hospitals were delayed, creating the all too familiar backups of patients in ERs statewide. And it must be remembered that almost all referrals for admission to state psychiatric hospitals are true emergencies.

A guard is reflected in a ...
Helen H. Davis, Denver Post file

A hallway at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo, Denver Post file photo.

Judge Marsha Pechman of Washington state began fining Washington in the fall of 2017 $1500 daily after she found the state in contempt for not being able to deliver adequate care for the ITP patients. Her fines later escalated as she found the CEO of the Western State Hospital and the state mental health agency in contempt, to over $50M in total fines last year. By the time Judge Pechman began to levy the fines against Washington, its statewide monthly judicial orders, mirroring Colorado’s almost exactly were averaging 291 in-jail evaluation orders.
The issue is that most states in the USA continue to be flooded with mandated admissions of inmates from state judicial systems for psychiatric evaluations. These types of admissions are variously termed ITPs or incompetent to proceed to trial patients and other arcane terms derived from states’ laws designations. Washington state has struggled mightily more than most states with this issue so much that a Washington state judge has fined the state over $50M in the past two years because of the delays in care for other patients who had ended up warehoused for weeks to months at a time in general hospitals all over the state.
The Governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who has been working at a furious pace with the Washington state legislature, recently announced new plans to try to have regional, non-state hospital-based forensic evaluation centers in different parts of the state by 2022 to handle all the ITP case needs. This is innovative in that most states do not have such a system.
In decades past, states had “forensic centers” that were designated the proper facilities to handle such cases. In the states that had such, their capacities were usually not increased from levels of the 1960’s. One such notable and nationally recognized center was and still is Michigan’s Center for Forensic Psychiatry south of Ann Arbor Michigan. Another has been the infamous Massachusetts facility Bridgewater state hospital’s forensic unit. Its heyday has long passed, and it has been the site of repeated scandals for a good decade and is not such a good example…
Nationally some of the forensic facilities were phased out as such units were incorporated into state psychiatric hospitals’ physical plants. But overall, the bed needs were not increased to keep up with population growth for over 50 years, hence the ‘sudden’ swamping of these facilities in whatever form they existed nationally.
Additionally, the impetus of the legal system has been to increasingly become scrupulous about ensuring inmates’ rights are protected to assure access to mental health evaluation and treatment. Issues of below average intelligence, organic mental conditions and medical conditions affecting legal issues such as the ability to know right from wrong, judgment, impairment of any sort at the times of commission of crimes, were more readily identified than ever in the past.
Also, it likely has become the standard of practice in the world of legal defense representation, to adequately refer to such psychiatric review whenever there is a question such an issue may exist with any defendant.
All these factors have fed into the current national crisis of explosion of need for such forensic psychiatric services at all levels and not just in infamous trials involving serial killers or cases involving the rich and famous.
All states who currently fall short of providing these mandated services will have to face the coming necessities of funding for such services along with all the other inadequacies of social, educational and human services gutted over the last 30 years. How all this will play out will in no small part shape the political and social policy debates in this country for decades.
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Drastic Soluution to Court Ordered Psychiatric Evaluations: Stop Doing Them

In an article published this date,July 20, 2017 in the Argus Leader of Yankton South Dakota, “State hospital no longer performing court-ordered mental health exams,” and referenced articles published several months ago in the same paper which I have referenced and linked below, there is explained in some of the best and most clear, succinct reporting I have seen in several years, all the fuss and complicated issues surrounding one very critical part of the national mental health service delivery crisis for which there appears no end or easy solution in sight.

The problem is that in South Dakota specifically to start there as our study example, the state psychiatric hospital system (the state has only one such hospital because of its relatively low population) has been and is still been flooded with court ordered inmates from county jails all over the state for admission to be given forensic evaluations for fitness (competency is the legal term) to stand trial. Most of these persons are truly mentally ill, which is another part of the Gordian knot comprising this crisis that has been developing for over three decades nationwide. South Dakota’s hospital came under review and journalistic investigation by the Argus Leader some six months ago because 1) overcrowding was at a crisis level; 2) the hospital was running full and could not literally admit in a prompt and responsive manner the growing number of “ITP” patients (incompetent to proceed to trial); 3) mentally ill inmates were logjammed in unrelenting and overwhelming numbers in the state’s country jails; 4) counties’ budgets were being decimated by the costs of housing and trying to treat as much as they could with very limited resources, the psychiatric needs of these stalled patients/inmates; 5) the rights of the inmates/patients to a reasonably speedy trial-disposition of justice-were being far exceeded.

This is NOT a problem particular to way up there northern plain state of ‘lil ol’ South Dakota with its very small population, perhaps limited state revenue and budget. This is a NATIONAL CRISIS that is being seen in virtually every state in the United States. There are many factors for this and on the occasion of this post I will not go into much detail on why this has grown into the “Feed Me” monster plant of the famous play of decades ago that is devouring resources, facilities, budgets, policy wonk’s best ideas and stretching our mental health delivery system past its breaking point. The one factor I will briefly waggle my “I told you so” sorrowful finger at, is the predicted result of trans-institutionalization that I have written about quite often in this blog. ‘Nuff said for now. But it will be a very thorough conversation and historical revelation and analysis for another time.

Another very telling factor that I have not included in my list of causative/exacerbating factors above because it is literally out of South Dakota’s control, is the extreme shortage of psychiatrists and allied psychological professionals especially both forensic psychiatrists and psychologists. Training programs for these specialists have been too small since I was a resident in the 1970’s and the output of teentsy numbers of these subspecialists is now catching up with us in a big way and forming a “chokepoint” in the delivery of these systems for which there is no timely solution.

So what did poor South Dakota’s state psychiatric hospital do? They decided bravely to completely STOP performing such psychiatric forensic evaluations. This decision somewhat flabbergasted (I have loved that word since I was a blabber mouthed kid) at this really brave and somewhat bureaucratically perilous, singular decision. I think South Dakota is the only state to make such a governmental service decision. In my world, this is almost akin to stop paving the highways, or shut down half the public schools or some other state governmental function that we all take for granted whether we are aware of its importance or not.

The state went so far as the leave monies for all these legal-psychiatric services completely out of the state budget! To read the account of this very unusual move, read the following article: “ Mental health court money left out of state budget.”

Perhaps other states have done the same thing recently but honestly my Google and other search news bots have not alerted me that such has occurred at all anywhere. As we say in the South, I have not “heard tell of”  anything like this.

Progress at Western State Hospital in Washington State: A Good Example for Other Beleaguered Hospital Systems?

Western State (psychiatric) Hospital has been in operational distress for more than a year now and following the travails of this facility and its staff from the line ward workers and behavioral care technicians, nurses and professional staff has been quite sad and discouraging for anyone interested in mental health reform and service delivery policy.

Continue reading “Progress at Western State Hospital in Washington State: A Good Example for Other Beleaguered Hospital Systems?”

Washingston State Hospital System Fined

IN a very recent story of less than a week ago, entitled: “Washington accrues almost $7.5 million in contempt fines,” written by Martha Bellislea of the Associated Press published in many major newspapers across the country, the sad story of the travails of Washington’s Western State Hospital continues to showcase the plight of a number state public psychiatric hospitals.

 

Continue reading “Washingston State Hospital System Fined”