Please read this important message from Ron Manderscheid, Executive Director of the The National Association for Rural Mental Health

Dear Colleagues:

WH Op-Ed in Washington Post on Monday, February 10:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/09/americans-have-failed-people-with-mental-illness-trumps-new-budget-will-change-that/

This comparison of 1950s state hospital beds with the number of individuals with MI in Jails is always used by the far right in the mental health field and by the current WH.

Here are some actual statistics:

1. In 2018, most people who receive inpatient MH services were NOT in SH, but in other psychiatric  inpatient settings.  In our paper on psychiatric inpatient capacity last year, we found that SHs were only 22% of the 24 hour psychiatric treatment capacity.
2. So another statement could be  4.5 times as many persons with MI receive hospital care in non-state hospitals as in state hospitals.

2. SMHA systems served 7.5 million unique clients last year (a total of 131,633 clients were reported as being served in SH throughout last year).  Thus,
3. 57 times more clients received community MH services than SH services last year.

3. If we take the 356,000 individuals with MI in Jails and Prisons and compare that with the 7.5 million SMHA clients, we could also say:
4. 21 times more clients received community MH services than were in Jails/Prisons.

4. An additional, but harder point to make succinctly, also was addressed in our “Trends in Psychiatric Inpatient Capacity” paper. That paper identified that many of the 550,000 patients served in state hospitals in the 1950s did not have psychiatric illnesses that would be treated in state hospitals today….many of the SH residents in the 1950s had intellectual disabilities or dementia (aging related illnesses) that would not be treated in a psychiatric hospital today (for example, the 1950s was before Medicaid would pay for care for elderly in Nursing Homes and thus many State Hospitals had very large elderly patient populations).

Hope that you will use the correct information.

Ron

Ron Manderscheid, PhD
Executive Director
NACBHDD – The National Assn of County Behavioral Health and Developmental Disability Directors
NARMH – The National Assn for Rural Mental Health
660 North Capitol Street, NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20001