Mental health law unhelpful
Published 3:09 pm Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Recent news reports highlight the questionable sanity of a state law passed with little fanfare during the recent legislative session.
The bill’s authors were motivated to act after an Eastern State Hospital patient escaped last year during a field trip to a county fair. He was caught three days later.
The law:
1. Allows defendants to be found “guilty and mentally ill” and sent to prison instead of being committed to a state mental hospital.
2. Allows the secretary of the Department of Social and Health Services to move persons found not guilty by reason of insanity from the hospital in which they currently reside to prison.
The organization Disability Rights Washington immediately challenged the law, and was joined last week by the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
The suit contends the law does not provide any means to stop the state from moving acquitted patients to prison. The law does not provide for hearing, legal counsel, or any other means to stop DSHS from moving acquitted patients to prison, according to Disability Rights. The law only requires DSHS make a written statement that the person can’t be managed in the hospital because of security concerns.
The state’s move, unfortunately, is in keeping with the results of a study released last week that found on average, a seriously mentally ill person in the U.S. is three times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized.
In no state was a seriously mentally ill person — someone with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, for example — less likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized, the report by the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Treatment Advocacy Center found.
Last summer’s escape by Phillip Arnold Paul, diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, who was committed to Eastern for the 1987 strangling of 78-year-old Sunnyside woman, was scary, embarrassing and violated the hospital’s rules. But the law passed by the Legislature doesn’t address the rare occurrence (or prevention) of a mentally ill patient’s escape. Rules adopted by the state in January, however, do correct holes in the field trip policy.
The escape was reportedly triggered when a judge rejected Paul’s request to move from Eastern to a residential facility in Spokane. The judge found that Paul represented “a threat to public safety.”
Definitely sounds like someone who shouldn’t be allowed to live in a residential facility. Or taken on a field trip. Or sent to prison. The new law would serve only to shuttle mentally ill people from hospitals, where they might stand a chance of getting some help, to our over-crowded prisons, where they will get no help at all.
