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A System of Mental Care That's Broken

News & Advance - 6/23/2017

Virginia's mental health care system is an embarrassment, a ticking time bomb, a human tragedy waiting to happen.

We've known it since April 2007 when a mentally disturbed student who slipped through the cracks in Virginia's mental health care system shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, still the most deadly school mass shooting in United States history.

We've known it since November 2013 when Gus Deeds, the son of state Sen. Creigh Deeds of Bath County, had a psychotic episode and tried to kill his father before committing suicide, less than 24 hours after local mental health officials were unable to find a psychiatric bed for him and sent him home with his dad.

We've known it since August 2015 when Jaymychael Mitchell, a 24-year-old man from Tidewater who suffers from mental illness, died of neglect in a Hampton Roads jail where he was being held for stealing five bucks' worth of junk food. He literally wasted away, forgotten about and overlooked by jail personnel and even after a judge had ordered he be sent to a state mental health facility.

Time and again, after each tragedy, legislators and policymakers in Richmond have pledged to address the system's shortcomings, hire more mental health professionals, close the legal loopholes and do whatever it would take to avoid a repeat in the future.

And time and again, we've seen a new tragedy occur, highlighting yet another shortcoming in the system, with the pattern of programed response repeating itself over and over.

Earlier this month, in a packed conference room at the headquarters building of the Chesterfield Community Services Board, Gov. Terry McAuliffe ceremoniously signed into law three pieces of legislation passed during the 2017 session of the General Assembly.

Together, the three bills will more strictly govern mental health screenings and require local Community Service Boards - the regional bodies that are the points of entry into the state's delivery system for publicly funded mental health, intellectual disability and substance abuse programs - to expand offerings by 2021.

Among other things, two of the new laws require same-day assessment when someone comes to a local CSB in the midst of a mental health episode, the provision of outpatient as well as crisis services, rehabilitation programs, services designed especially for military veterans and support services for families. The third requires immediate transfer of mentally ill jail inmates to a hospital if so ordered by a judge.

But the money to pay for it all? To hire the trained professionals to do these assessments? To provide the needed hospital psychiatric beds? What the state has put up is a mere drop in the bucket compared with the need and the cost of meeting that need.

Just consider that on the day Gov. McAuliffe signed the bills, the state mental health hospitals were at 95 percent of capacity - the system's daily goal is 85 percent. Or that evaluators at the state's 40 CSBs do, on average, 252 emergency evaluations on a daily basis ... or close to 90,000 each year.

Virginia's system for dealing with the mental health needs of its residents simply cannot handle the demand. The system is stretched too thin, and the resources are too little. There needs to be fundamental, top-to-bottom restructuring or, sooner or later, we'll be dealing with another crisis that could have been averted.