I have been an advocate for the mentally ill for 50 years. And, our treatment of the mentally disabled has steadily declined for those 50 years. In Tennessee, we now have a psych bed rate per person that is lower than prior to the US Civil War.
In the early 1970's, I worked in psych crisis services in Chattanooga. We did not have this deluge of homeless, mentally disabled people on the streets then. What we face now is something entirely new, not faced in western societies since the middle ages. We should be ashamed.
When the new Hamilton County Mental Health Court opened a couple of months ago, the court cited the following figures: 500 severely MI people in the Hamilton County jail, and 1,000 more at Silverdale. These are people with histories of psychiatric treatment and civil commitment.
I am on the local board for Moccasin Bend Mental Health Institute. As I recall, our daily census is less than 300 beds, and that is capacity. The Institute serves about half the state from the state lines of Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama.
So, in one county we have 1,500 MI in jail, and we have 300 public psych beds to cover half the state (millions of Tennesseans).
We are trying to get both the U.S. Attorney's Offices and the OCR in the U.S. Department of Justice involved. I hope that they have the courage and integrity to address these problems.
In our meetings for the Chattanooga Alliance for the Mentally Ill, our most common problem is finding help for our loved ones. We have many wonderful resources in Chattanooga like Moccasin Bend Institute, Johnson Mental Health Center and the AIM Center. But, they are given the impossible job of working with too many people in crisis with very little resources.
My daughter Carrie was murdered in Knoxville in 2008 by a MI young man. In court, he plead "Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, " which the jury did not accept.
How many more people will die because of our callous, inhumane abuse of these folks with brain diseases?
Steve Daugherty, Sr.
Red Bank
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Mr. Daugherty, I can’t thank you enough for letting your voice be heard. My son is in the “system.” My husband and I have a just named a new syndrome. It is CTSD: Constant Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
My son is continually cycling through the mental health system. He has been in nine supervised group homes and 14 psychiatric facilities from here to Illinois, Oklahoma, and Texas to name a few. I am not ashamed, I am saddened.
It is a constant struggle to find continuous supervised care for my son in group homes. Most times they have given up on him and forced him into a new group home via a psychiatric hospital he lands in because of his mental illness/medical disorder, or, in one instance, let him discharge himself and then let him walk away. Our latest event was when the caregivers took him to a crisis center and left him there.
If the mentally ill are lucky enough to have loved ones and caregivers to advocate for them, the system does not have the resources to permanently care for them. Most are in jail or walking the streets committing crimes. If there were enough resources, caregivers could be properly paid and trained to supervise group homes and we might begin to have permanent placements for the ill that live in our homes, on the streets and in jails.
Jail is not the answer for the mentally ill but they end up there because of their illness. The jails have been forced to house them because government has slid them under the rug.
I am truly grateful to all who have fought the battle for my son, including the courts, Moccasin Bend, Joe Johnson Mental Health, the AIM Center and for the Mental Health Court we now have.
JoAnn Temple