After the massacre at Virginia Tech there was great promise that Virginia would reform its mental health system. There was great promise that we would never get caught with our proverbial pants down again and we would march forth to improve our psychiatric faciltities and access to treatment. Nothing much as happened. Like all searing scars, great promises are made and they rarely amount to a hill of beans. Such was the case with the Old Dominion.
Deeds was apparently stabbed by his 24-year-old son, Gus, on Tuesday. Gus, who then shot himself to death, had been given a psychiatric exam the previous day but was released because of an inability to locate a psychiatric bed in remote and rural Bath County.
The elder Deeds, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2009, was airlifted to a hospital in Charlottesville, where he is in fair condition after being treated for stab wounds.
This incident has spurred immediate discussion of Virginia’s attitude regarding the mentally ill – namely, that they are a proper and obvious target for funding cuts when it comes time to squeeze budgets. From 2005 to 2010, according to a report last year by the Treatment Advocacy Center, Virginia eliminated 15 percent of its public psychiatric beds. It has just 17.6 beds per 10,000 people, 40 percent of a target of 50 beds per 10,000 recommended by professionals, according to Sy Mukherjee of ThinkProgress.
Gov. Robert F. McDonnell recommended even more cuts last year, according to Mukherjee.
Virginia is not unique in its attitude. States have cut mental health spending so much that the country’s hospitals had only 28 percent of the recommended number of beds in 2010.
So, we are even doing worse rather than flat-lining. We are losing ground. We need more beds, more facilities, more outpatient treatment centers, more shelters, more everything. We also need enlightenment when it comes to issues of mental health. Americans still think it is shameful to be mentally ill.
My father was undiagnosed mentally ill. I say undiagnosed because he wasn’t receiving treatment. We all knew he had ‘issues’ and my brothers, mother, and extended family all treated his sometimes unacceptable behavior like it was the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Either no one mentioned it and yes, we always blamed his blow ups on the situation, (if whoever just hadn’t done thus and such….) rather than confronting the fact that he had just had a completely inappropriate response to something someone else had done. I think my siblings and I thought we were protecting our mother. What we really needed to do was a good, healthy intervention. We did not do it. People of my parents’ generation didn’t discuss mental illness. (excuses, excuses). They didn’t even have proper vocabulary for it. They just said someone was “raving crazy” or that Old Man Whoever had a bad temper, or Mrs. Jones was eccentric.
If I could go back in time and fix a few things, that would be the very first place I would start. I am fairly convinced that some of my father’s issues were related to sports injuries. Helmets in those days were like wearing a shoe on your head. The more that I read about CTE, its causes and symptoms the more convinced I become. But what good does that do me or my family now? The time for intervention was then, not now after he is dead and gone. How many others react like my family reacted? Far too many, I suspect. Even if we couldn’t fix the problem at least we would have know what it was and it wouldn’t have been that 800 pound gorilla in the room.
If there is a silver lining with the horrible Deeds tragedy, I sincerely hope that the good that comes out of tragedy will be that we no longer underfund issues related to mental health. Hopefully the General Assembly will prioritize this issue and make Virginia a role model for other states to address an issue that has for too long been underfunded and under-discussed. The time for change is now.
I heard a news update this morning that indicates there were beds available in VA, 3 of which were in Rockingham county. Still, considering that we are the most medicated people in all of history (ADHD, Anxiety, Depression, etc.) having even 25 beds per 10K people doesn’t seem like a huge undertaking.
I guess that having the beds is only half the problem. Being able to find them when needed must be the other half. 3 hardly sounds excessive.
I serve on the PWC CSB and I can tell you that beds and funding were an issue every year. Nobody wants to take care of the mentally ill until something like this happens, then there is a lot of hubbub and nothing happens.