On December 12, 2015 the newspaper, the major newspapers in North Caroline, Winston-Salem Journal p, The Durham Morning Herald, and the Raleigh News and Observer, all published as article, ” Researchers measure NC psychiatric bed shortage.” In this article, hard data confirmed what has been known for a number of years, the North Carolina, in spite of its unique and laudatory efforts, almost head and shoulders above most states in the US, still needs many more psychiatric beds. North Carolina is unique and to be regarded positively in its almost singular effort to spend hundreds of millions of dollars upgradings its entire state hospital physical plants over the last several years. Almost no other state in the Union is doing this in this time of tight state fiscal budgets, and the lingering slow recovery of the now nearly 10 years banking and housing bubble scandal-induced Great Recession. NC has closed one old hospital, the former John Umsted state hospital in the “institutional” town of Butner NC, just 20 miles or so NE of Durham and replaced it and the now closed famous Dorothea Dix Hospital of Raleigh named after the 19th century’s more famous mental health reformer, Dorothea Dix, with a new nearly 400 bed state hospital , Central Regional Hospital. NC has also nearly finished completing replacing the old “Cherry State Hospital,” in Goldsboro serving the eastern third of the state with another completely new facility.
As an historical and “tourist guide” type aside, the town of Butner is tiny and sprang up in the rattlesnake-infested pine forests north of Durham in WWII when Camp Butner was built by the Army as a major military training center and was the site of a 4000 bed Army hospital for wounded veterans from the ongoing War in Europe. It was the second largest such hospital during WWII on the East Coast. After the war, in 1947, the year I was born it was sold to NC for $1 on the condition it be utilized as a state hospital for the mentally ill. On a persona note, my own training psychoanalyst, who came to NC to help state psychiatry at UNC Medical School, was named its first psychiatric superintendent. Butner is currently also the 30 year site for the famous or infamous “Federal Correctional Facity” where some of the worst federal psychiatrically insane criminals have been housed and evaluated such as Ted Kazsinski, The “Unibombers,” Mark Chapman, John Hinkley and many others.
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