http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/8735116.htm?1c
The fact that an article like this isn't worthy of being national news attests to that.
It seems obvious to me that this is an intolerable situation, but since its been going on for quite some time, perhaps there's not a consensus on that point, would anyone argue that this is just a necessary consequence of having private health care? or that it is rather a matter of priorites, something that we just can't afford to deal with?
This situation has a number of possible remedies, from laws requiring that states provide treatment for the mentally ill to national health care. The problem is that the people who suffer from the current situation are in no position to push for change.
I didn't know things were this bad and they aren't everywhere, but the treatment of the mentally ill in the US overall is terrible.The voices are relentless. They insult him, threaten him, tell him to slit his wrists. Raymond Santos is 30 years old and exhausted, run ragged for most of his life by a biochemical tempest in his mind.
A year ago, he grew so desperate for the voices to shut up that he tried to appease them by taking a large, serrated kitchen knife and digging it four inches into his stomach. Two weeks later, with 31 staples in his abdomen, he landed in Florida's largest psychiatric facility.
The Miami-Dade County Jail.
He was locked up in a wing where psychotic inmates sleep on the tile floor or rusted metal bed frames, without sheets, blankets or mattresses. They stay in their cells for 24 hours a day. No books, no TV, no visitors, no toothbrush, no eating utensils, no clothes.
They screech and cower at unseen demons. They pace furiously and rip their paper gowns off. They urinate on the floor and bathe in the toilet.
The noise never stops, the fluorescent lights mask the passing of days, and the psychiatrist treats patients through a three-inch-wide ''chow hatch'' in a steel door.
''I don't even try to describe to people what's going on up here,'' said Dr. Joseph Poitier, the jail psychiatrist. ``It's beyond talking about.''
The scene is just one consequence of a nationwide failure to care for the severely mentally ill, a situation created over the last 40 years by the closing of psychiatric hospitals in Florida and other states.
The fact that an article like this isn't worthy of being national news attests to that.
It seems obvious to me that this is an intolerable situation, but since its been going on for quite some time, perhaps there's not a consensus on that point, would anyone argue that this is just a necessary consequence of having private health care? or that it is rather a matter of priorites, something that we just can't afford to deal with?
This situation has a number of possible remedies, from laws requiring that states provide treatment for the mentally ill to national health care. The problem is that the people who suffer from the current situation are in no position to push for change.