Much of the keynote speech that I gave over the weekend at the opening session of the South Carolina Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Charleston focused on how 3,500 inmates in that’s state’s prisons are being abused, neglected and mistreated.  My comments were sparked by a judge’s recent ruling in a horrific class action lawsuit.

“The evidence… has proved that inmates have died in the South Carolina Department of Corrections for lack of basic mental health care, “ Circuit Court Judge Michael Baxley wrote in a ruling released in January, “and hundreds more remain substantially at risk for serious physical injury, mental de-compensation, and profound, permanent mental illness.”

The judge found that mental health care in South Carolina prisons is so  “inherently flawed and systemically deficient in all major areas” that it violates the prisoners’ fundamental constitutional rights.  The judge called the lawsuit the most troubling of the 70,000 cases that he has adjudicated in the past 14 years.

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Why do some communities have better mental health services than others? In a recent Op Ed published in The Washington Post,   I took my home state of Virginia to task because our outgoing governor appointed yet another task force to study mental health — the 16th in recent years. In that opinion piece, I describe the four “secrets” to success that I have found during my travels.

How does your community fare when it comes to these four earmarks?

Va. doesn’t need another mental health task

By Pete Earley, The Washington Post

Virginians should be embarrassed and angry that a newly appointed state mental health task force convened Tuesday in Richmond. It is the 16th task force asked to investigate the state’s mental health system.

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Like Deeds Family, Others Still At Risk

Why is testimony that criticized Virginia’s state mental health department noticably missing from a website that the department created to keep the public informed about a newly appointed mental health task force?

Outgoing Governor Robert McDonnell appointed a task force shortly before leaving office to investigate if the state had sufficient psychiatric  hospital beds for Virginians in the midst of a mental breakdown. The governor took action after Austin “Gus” Deeds, the son of state Senator Creigh Deeds, attacked his father with a knife last November before fatally shooting himself. A mental health worker said after the incident that the younger Deeds had been sent home without treatment because there were no beds available in local hospital psychiatric units.

At the task force’s first meeting held January 7th, one of the final witnesses of the day warned that nothing had changed since the Deeds incident to make beds more accessible. In fact, G. Douglas Bevelacqua, the state’s inspector general for behavioral health, warned that people were still being turned away daily in the state — just as the Deeds family was.

Yet his testimony alone seems to be missing from the recorded remarks that everyone else gave.

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Mental illnesses don’t pay attention to anyone’s race, sex or nationality but those factors  often do play a role in whether or not an individual receives meaningful treatment. Today our nation is honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so I asked Keris Jän Myrick to write a guest blog for me and she graciously agreed.

Myrick is President and CEO of Project Return Peer Support Network and the current Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Thank you Keris for your willingness to share your personal story,  thoughts, insights and for your leadership.

Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr -Dare to Dream

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.”

For those of us diagnosed with mental illnesses and our families and loved ones, we know all to well the effects of these inequalities from personal and first hand experiences. For those of us like me, we also know of the extreme health and mental health disparities that exist within our communities of color. Within communities of color, the first introduction to mental health care is usually involuntary commitment to hospitals and/or incarceration in jails both resulting in trauma, humiliation and reducing the likelihood of voluntarily seeking services when needed.

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