Tag: mental health reform

A Good Idea from a Texas Mental Health Leader

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.

 

Contrarian Thoughts on the State Mental Hospital System: We Still Need Them

The state hospital system in this country began as an attempt in various of the early 13 colonies and later the early states as humane, for the most part, attempts to house the mentally ill. Williamsburg VA, now the site of Eastern Virginia State Hospital and a  similar facility established by the Quakers in Philadelphia were two of the earliest efforts. There was no effective treatment until the advent of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy in the 1940’s and 1050’s with its own then shortcomings and crude, barbaric techniques till refined later, and the advent of psychiatric medications starting with Thorazine, Valium Elavil etc., in the 1950’s.

By this time even the best efforts of Clifford Beers a man who had recurrent psychotic mental illness and wrote in the early 1900’s the first widely read autobiographical account of his onw psychosis which was a national sensation as it described basically for the first time for the public, the pain of being mentally ill, and Dorothea Dix the great crusader for the mentally ill the lattter half of the 1800’s, fell short of preventing the average state hospital from turning into a facility for containment, incarcertion, etc., of the mentally ill. The famous book ASYLUM was published in the fifties and cranked up the debate over “institutionalization” and debasing treatment of the patients in the average state hospital. This fueled, the movement to get patients out of state hospitals, then beginning to be thought of as cruel institutions and less as places of possible treatment or early rehabilitation. This book came on the national scene at the “right” time, caught the attention of the public, politicians, advocates and helped to state the partial dismantling of state hospitals nearly every where. Bed numbers were reduced from averages of a few thousand beds per hospital, as many state hospitals were indeed massive. Smaller was thought to be better and bed numbers through the second half of the 20th century over time came down to the hundreds. And this does not include the dozens of institutions that were outright closed, because of revelations of abuse, mistreatment, no treatment, subhuman conditions, and “warehousing.” The Comprehensive Mental Health Center Act of 1963 was enacted as one of the last major pieces of legislation of the JFK Presidency. Smaller treatment-oriented facilities were to be built all over the country by the hundreds, often to be linked up with major medical centers. One of the earliest community psychiatric hospitals so built was Marshall I. Pickens Hospital in Greenville SC next to Greenville Memorial Hospital. They both still exist today; GMH is the major teaching hospital because of its size and faculty, of the University of South Carolina at Columbia. The opening of Marshall Pickens Hospital was graced by the presence of no less than Hubert Humphrey in the early years of Lyndon Johnson’s administration after the assassination of President Kennedy.

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Closing State Psychiatric HosptalAs: Consequences, Good and Not So Good

As usual I always bow to my internal ethics and try to be as open and transparent as possible about the subject at hand, revealing attitudes, biases, views based on long term experience, and an almost “historical view” of the galloping phenomenon of “mental health care delivery reform” thankfully occupying the attention of the country finally. I am old enough to have practiced in the so called mental health age of oodles of resources, and have watched them atrophy, became extinct, go corrupt and get themselves prosecuted out of existence, lose funding for many many understandable reasons, lose their place of importance, watch the ever decreasing number of bright talented younger generations of “would have been social workers, psychiatrists, and psychologists” shy away from the training programs, and our numbers go down especially in child psychiatry. One could take an  inflammatory demagogic view and see is as necessary to prevent th abuse and horrors that indeed happened for decades shuttered away out of the light of public review and knowledge and responsible accountability and oversight. But that approach has nearly led to the old saw of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater because something was wrong with the bathwater, too dirty, too hot, whatever. I have seen the inhumane past and still in more restricted corners, inhumane treatment of patients in poorly run state hospitals that made me so mad I thought i would bomb them into the ground they were so bad, but of course after evacuating the helpless patients. I have helped to de-accredite the abominations of such hospitals, a few but enough to see first hand the decades old cultures of isolated facilities with poor faculty, psychiatrists who could work no where else due to histories of alcoholism, just plain bad practitioners and all the rest. I have had close colleagues since my residency days who presided  over the deserved federally mandated dismantling of closure of famous hellholes permitted to exist far too long and heard their stories of generations of horror stories.

But in the midst of all this, or in my case in the last quarter of my career, I still know and hold to the somewhat unpopular certitude that state psychiatric hospitals are needed, good ones and now more than every. One simply statistic is that out country’s population and mental health treatment burden has at least doubled if now tripled since World War II. And we have had new mental health phenomenon syndromes, traumatic brain injuries of unforeseen overwhelming magnitude outstripping the abilities of public and private psychiatric-neurological treatment worlds to receive, treat and comprehensively help them out of our IED head rattling new genre of injuries in the Middle Eastern conflicts we have had to enter, police and try to stabilize at little thanks from much of the rest of the concerned world with some exceptions.

State hospitals across the country have been marked for closure and destructions for decades with the trend accelerating greatly in the last 2o years or so. It was thought and expected the the monies saved from funding these “dinosaurs” would be responsibly shifted to the long known need for massive outpatient services for the CMI, chronically mentally ill for which the state hospitals had long existed and served, and served well in a surprising high number of hospitals. Remember the famous Meninnger family of three generations of nationally recognized humane psychiatrists practiced in a state public hospital, Topeka State in Kansas a venerable training and research facility itself.

Continue reading “Closing State Psychiatric HosptalAs: Consequences, Good and Not So Good”

History of Michigan’s Mental Health System Continuing Crisis

Yesterday, July 2, 2015 I gave credit to a medical innovator and systems analyst, a physician, and a plastic surgeon, at that, at Henry Ford Macomb Hospital in Clinton Township MI, Dr. Vikram Reddy MD MAHS who as medical quality of care director of the hospitl, wrote in the Free Press and Bridge Magazine there locally of his pilot project to try to address the long standing, not improving problem of “frequent flyer,” high cost, not resolving ER patients that represent one of the growing and worst public health care crises in this country that plague every hospital in the USA large or small. He is making a superb effort to organize, energize, find and locate appropriate medical management services for these problematic medical consumers who seek highest cost care in the most inappropriate place, the hospital ER. This relates to many nationwide problems growing since the Reagan years that I will refer to later. But Dr. Reddy is trying an approach being looked at nationally as a solution to this issue, i.e., diversion/referral to appropriate services outside the ER that do much more good, are able to give these patients long term, continuing, consistent disease management that they need and deserve and that is where the healthcare dollars are really saved while at the same providing health maintaining and promoting care, care that prevents relapse of their conditions, and keeps them from going into crisis and having to seek inpatient care which is usually at least 10 to 20 times the cost of outpatient care. Now don’t you think that would motivate the planner and governments to seize upon these sensible solutions? “Not hardly” as they say here in the South.

Who are the patients? They can be easily identified as falling in approximately these groups: (and I apologize right now if my brain leaves out/omit significant groups as I will comment upon those I know and see the best and most and may omit others); 1) the drug prescription abuser/addict who has or utilizes inappropriately a pain condition to repetitively doctor shop, and nowadays “ER shop,” in  order to gain more prescriptions for opiates, to abuse until they run out and start all over again at the same or a different ER: 2) the chronic substance abuse who is not in recovery whether having been in “starter” substance abuse programs, like inpatient detox program/units, or AA/NA etc., and come in for acute treatment of intoxication and consequent often legal problems (assaults, disorderly conduct, impulsive threats while “out of their (rational) minds making temporary suicidal or homicdal or assaultive threats, or for worsening of many extremely serious comorbidities [accompanying serious recurrent medical problems from continued substance abuse: delirium, worsening of liver disease going into cirrhotic crisis, hepato-renal renal failure, bleeding from the esophagus’ enlarged “varicose like” veins, acute pancreatitis, comatose states from alcohol poisoning or just plain old overdosing on sedating, respiration suppressing drugs ranging from opiates to anti-anxiety medications like Xanax, 3) the young adult who is developmentally disabled and psychiatrically ill  who goes into acute psychiatric crisis, assaults their parents for no reasons, becomes destructive, leaves the home and starts dangerous behaviors like wandering in the woods and on the sides of high speed highways; and lastly 4) the mentally ill who come from homes, the streets, shelters and now ever increasing from the local jails, in acute psychotic crisis and demand immediate attention as much as patient having a myocardial infarction in progress.

So that is what Dr. Reddy is facing in his hospital in Clinton Township MI. Where did this start in Michigan? It started in the recession of the 1980’s when the Big Three automakers were really losing business to the foreign carmakers, especially VW and the Japanese brands who were building better quality cars, that were more efficient and cost less. As the American auto industry suffered massively so did Michigan since guess what? Michigan was ill suited to weather economic change ever if it were positive and revolutionary. Its economy like so many states in the South who suffered even more for even longer, was not diversified; it was based largely on manufacturing with a huge percentage of the machine shops all over SE Michigan serving the auto industry, and agriculture. Tourism, the state higher education university system and big time sports helped but not that much in reality. So the state had to cut revenues and one of the places it placed emphasis upon was the mental health cost center of the state government. Gov. Engler as is known slashed services all over Michigan and by 2000 was planning to privatize the entire system to get the state out of the mental health business which had become an article of faith by then at the National Governors’ Conference in those years. “Cut and Privatize Mental Health.” Nowadays the new mantra is to dismantle the state employees’ unions and workers’ associations and somehow transmogrify a pretty dedicated work force in the McDonald’s restaurant model of the not long term, disposable, LOW paid employee.

By 1999 and certainly by 2000 the Detroit Free Press had been running a series of articles on the dismantling of the mental health system since approximately 1992 or thereafter as the “privatization” ethos of those times from the era of Reagan deregulation as the solution to labor problems and inflation had taken hold of many politicians and policy planners, mostly of the Republican persuasion.

Ms. Wendy Wendland-Bowyer in the early 2000’s for the Free Press did creditable reporting on this evolving issues for a number of years. An example of an article of her, “State to unveil new plan for mental health system,” is a great example. In this she notes indirectly that at that point in time she state was having to “reverse” itself and retreat from its full privatization plan. This article ran on Sept. 1, 2000. But it noted the overriding principal was to convert the county mental health center based systems all over the state to full private competition in which privatized for profit mental health care provider business entities would eventually take over the delivery of mental health care. This was coming after the decade in which Gov. Engler had closed several state psychiatric facilities, Pontiac State, Clearwater, etc. She wrote: “the first phase of the waiver [a permission process from the Feds to do all this] required county mental health agencies to be run like manage care plans. The second phase was to open the county services to private competition.”

There was a feature based on population density, designed to promote business efficiency that has been coped in almost all states by now to eliminate small, supposedly inefficient service units in counties with sparse populations. “The new plan does require that county agencies meet certain goals in order to avoid private competition. For example, the agencies must have at least 20,000 Medicaid recipients in the geographic area – something 12 to 14 of the state’s 49 agencies have…” Of course the unforeseen consequence to this rule, was that with regional “centralization” of mental health centers usually into the county with the largest population of the several that had merged, services access became distant in all these mini-catchment areas for nearly a majority of clients, forcing them to travel longer distances to their ordinary appointments. Compliance went down, more appointments were not kept and guess what, clients ended up in ERs by the hundreds suddenly to all the bean counters’ surprise and have now been perplexing and occupying people like the good Dr. Reddy of Clinton Township with how to fashion a local solution to what is a state imposed system error.

I will apologize at this point. I have included the link to Ms. Wendland-Bowyer’s article, but it is hard to reach and you have to do some real “Search Box” or “Archive” searching to find it on the FREEP website as in the ensuing years the newspaper’s digital online edition has archived or taken down many many of the articles from that era. My sincerest apologies if it is no longer available.

In my next post on the history of the mental health plans and crises in Michigan, which serves as instruction and one of the true original examples for what has and is happening in most of the other states in this country currently, I will talk of the defunding issues of other sectors of the mental health care delivery system that the non provider, ordinary observer would not likely think of, nor realize who vitally important they are and always have been, and what enormous negative consequences they have also had behind the scenes further worsening the dumping of the mentally ill into systems that are not designed to adequately care for them.

 

Plastic Surgeon Describes Michigan Mental Health Delivery Issues: Mirrors Nationwide Problems

I would like to give creidt to Dr. Vikram Reddy MD MHSA, a plastic surgeon, NOT a psychiatrist who has lately been advocating in print for renewed reforms in the state of Michigan which is now over 20 years after the slash and burn cuts in that state’s public mental health care surgeon. You may find his timely and very thoughtful article in The Bridge Magazine or the trusty, still surviing Detroit Free Press.

You may ask why and how would a plastic surgeon of all physicians become so concerned about little ol’ mental health issues? Many reasons: 1) first and foremost he is a dedicated and committed physcician whose first priority is patient care, and primarily ensuring delivery of quality care; 2) he is “medical director of quality and clinical integration at his home hospital in Clinton Township, part of the Henry Ford Macomb Hospital system of great Detroit. His timely article, entitled, “Mental health care in has room for improvement, but will it?” says it all.

Dr. Reddy described a well thought clinical-analytic-management effort by his staff and himself to identify the problem patients of any kind who account in any hospital, especially in the ER departments, for utilizing, or in a more sarcastical-critical way of characterization, “using up,” the largest portion of such services for less than bona fide indiacation for the services they seek. And many of these services are costly procedures, and huge sinkholes of constantly recurring costs that do solve anything and ultimately do not “satisfy” or clnicmally meet the needs of the patients. Drug seeking pains who  claim pain, requires expensive workups by multiple specialistis, imaging studies, and then frustrating nonproductive earnest time spent with them thrying to divert them to more appropriate, and ultimately cost reducing services that appropriate address the problems of drug addiction. Also psychiatrist patients, for whom, like most every other state, there are not enough psychiatri residential or true 24 hour acute inpatient psychiatric beds and services manage and correct the issues that bring them repeatedly into ERs in crisis to get often the only timely help available to them. Dr. Reddy correctly alludes to, but does not specify, one of the historial causes of these typical nationwide problems, that has resulted in shorgages of outpatient services for psychiatric clients. I would inject the fact Republican Governor John Engle through the 1990’s’ reduced the statewide publc mental delivery system to a fraction of its former size. He, for instance, closed all but five of the major psychiatric state funded hospitals in the state. And like just about everywhere else, nowhere near a sliver of replacement community based services were responsibly created by the state. In fact this state was one of the first to start the Wild West, open the doors and let the private large and small business, not clinically oriented, agents of public psychiatric services take over. One would think that had this model worked which was exported by the same cadre of planners in Michgian to other states, notably the very next, North Carolina in 1999-2000 with very similar results except that NC did not close abruptly the four state hospitals, but instead “revamped” the community service universe by eliminating the county by county based mental health care delivery system, which while flawed through inadquate funing and other factors peculiar tot the geography and absurdity of having ONE HUNDRED often rural little bitty counties, and letting the privateeers decied what they would cherry pick and put in place. Buth states as well ass many others now face the second half of the equation of mental health care devliery, providing adequate and large, comprehensive multi-disciplinary relapse prevention of illness, whether it is substance abuse based, psychiatric or that of the developmentally disabled. North Carolina’s now causative “exacerbator,” was reducing almost by two thirds the public psychiatric beds in the whole state instead of closing hospitals, in order to save money.

Dr. Reddy has initiated a pilot project to identify frequent flyer costly mostly non=medically appropirate patients in the ER systems, and to responsibly divert, refer and get them to the services they need but often avoid, to stamp out maintenance of opioid additions through naive physician prescripbing and I suspect drug diversion but finds the outer system that needs in poorly organized and not up to the task.

He notes positively that the succeeding Democratic Governr Jennifer Granholm had to attempt to correct her predecessor’s Cossack approach, and I recall  her having to bravel condemn her political future by having to wring out of the state legislature and ailing economy, $500M to begin reorganize and stabilize the system. Dr. Reddy also refers to the more sensible long term positive approach of the current Governor Rick Snyder’s now comprehensive Mental Health Commision report and impetus of 2014 to begin to further “rehabilitate” the crippled Michigan system.

The reader who is intersted in the current nationahwie crisis of mental health care and its hobbled systems, both private and public would well advised to follow closely the developments in Michigan as the politicians, citizens, patients and their families, and their adovates and the providers, labor now to effect positive appropriate and responsible changes, that WILL cost money no matter what, and see if they are successful and can be a good example of a state’s corrective efforts for the rest of the states faciling simiilar issues.

 

Introduction to Mental Health Reform in North Carolina

Mental Health Reform began in North Carolina partially out of economic necessity. Other states had had to do so in the Midwest during the decade of the 1990’s for similar reasons, the decline of manufacturing in the so-called “Rust Belt,” but one example used mental health reform undeniably as a nearly vindictive budget slashing measure, singling out more than any other major expenditure category of a state budget for drastic cuts.

North Carolina’s impetus was truly largely driven by a perfect storm [no pun intended but it is one unfortunately nonetheless as the reader will quickly see below] confluence of unexpected and massive budgetary hits to the NC state coffers. In 1999-2000 along with a number of other segments of the economy, the “Dot Com” bubble burst nationally. This affected NC severely as North Carolina had long been building an information economic powerhouse through especially the Triangle area’s [Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh which are all within 8 or 15 miles of each depending on which leg of the triangle connecting the three cities you measure] universities, Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University, respectively. NC State at the time and still is the most technically driven of the three and is now beginning to rival Rensselaer, MIT, Georgia Tech and Cal Poly in terms of research, award winning faculty, technical centers and spin off high tech companies. In fact, NC State had already established a new technical campus, the Centennial Campus adjacent to NC State’s campus and on the way to Research Triangle Park toward Durham. That campus has continued to massively grow in the years since the dot com recovery, for instance now housing the headquarters of Red Hat, the world’s leading commercial Linux distribution. This illustrates how much of an economic vortex the RTP {Research Triangle Park) is, generating hundreds of millions of dollars into the state economy. When the Dot Com bubble burst in those days when idiotic Internet companies were starting up, having no real product but promising getting groceries delivered to your house (now perhaps closer to reality), being overvalued in the stock market by unimaginably inflated multiples, the RTP of North Carolina suffered greatly, more so than Silicon Valley which was older, more established, larger and deeper. Jobs by the thousands were lost which were very high paying. High tech personnel left the state, state income tax revenues took a substantial hit. All this was a preview on a mini-scale of what was to come in the 2008 mortgage housing and financial derivatives scandal and bubble/Great Recession, partially still with us.

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