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Finally, someone gets it
By Liss | September 8, 2008
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has recently had a couple of pieces on the state’s profoundly broken mental health system. As the mother of a victim of this system1, I’m glad to see attention focused on it. It is time for change, so that we can stop people being killed or lives destroyed by the state’s not-so-benign neglect of the mentally ill.
A ‘gravely disabled’ mental health care system
State’s broken process wastes money, chances, lives
“We wouldn’t let an Alzheimer’s patient leave the hospital to go sit on a sidewalk grate and rot,” Roy-Byrne said. “But we do that all the time for people who are mentally ill.”
State pays in blood for flawed mental health system
Laws kept suspects from care
A Seattle P-I analysis found the state is spending $1.8 billion on mental illness. But most is spent in courtrooms, squad cars, jail cells, homeless shelters and emergency rooms, not on prevention or long-term treatment. The biggest price taxpayers pay for mental illness in this state is not the cost of treatment — it’s the cost, and consequences, of failure to treat.
1 My 15 year-old son spent three years struggling to get the help that he needed to recover from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that came close to destroying him and our family. We almost lost him, despite pleading for help with every organization and department that we could find.
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Topics: politics, Seattle, Interesting Links |