13-Color
The Tribune 13
November 27, 2013
Illness Continued from Page 10
ago made jails and prisons the primary residential treatment centers for the mentally ill in Colorado, clogged emergency rooms, boosted medical expenses across the board, and expanded the ranks of the homeless on the streets of Denver and other cities. Eric Brown, a spokesman for the governor’s office, said that the new plan will help keep people from falling through the cracks. “There’s no way to make up all of the funding deficiencies and implement new programs in a short period,” Brown said, adding that it will take time and commitment.
Reagan played role
Two national policy shifts and an oil shale bust were behind the drop in funding in the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan took office at the start of the decade on a pledge to limit government spending. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 ranked among his first triumphs, cutting costs in part by transforming funding for mental health services into block grants to the states. In Colorado, those grants didn’t keep up with rising costs. Less than a year after this national legislation was passed, on May 2, 1982, Exxon pulled out of its oil shale operations in the Western Slope. Known as Black Sunday, the move foretold a massive bust in Colorado’s energy sector, triggering a recession and a decline in state tax revenue. Mental health services weren’t alone in suffering cutbacks — but the effects were stark. The state budget crisis took hold just as a broader philosophical shift was transforming the way mental health services were provided across the country. Legislation signed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 had called for the funding of community mental health centers, and initiated a broader discussion about the role of large institutions in the treatment of those with mental illness. Youlon Savage led the movement toward deinstitutionalization in Colorado, and was executive director of the first community
mental health center in the state to be funded under Kennedy’s initiative. He says the movement into community-based care was intended to help reduce stigma and promote integration. “Mental illness was no longer manifested by sending people away from home into large institutions,” says Savage. Even the Fort Logan mental health hospital in Denver was conceived as a community center when it opened in the 1960s. Staff didn’t wear uniforms, they worked closely in collaboration with patients who lived in a largely open and unlocked campus, and they made home visits to keep people out of the hospital. But broad slashes to the two state psychiatric hospitals in the 1970s deeply impacted both Fort Logan and Pueblo. By 1980, there were 1,103 public psychiatric beds in Colorado, down from 1,609 a decade earlier. Over the next decades, public beds would continue to disappear, and by 2013, the two state hospitals had only 545 beds. It wasn’t only the beds but the staffing and services that disappeared — services like home visits, community outreach and vocational training. “Fort Logan used to do all the things that the community mental health centers are supposed to be doing,” says Rebecca Watt, a former nurse at the hospital who believes that budget cuts have damaged the facility’s ability to treat its patients. The units for the elderly, children and teens at Fort Logan were among the most recent to close, in 2009. Recently, there were 38 people waiting for beds at Fort Logan and Pueblo, according to the Department of Human Services. The average wait time varies between eight and 25 days.
Local centers strapped
As the money moved out of the state hospitals, community mental health centers say they never got the funding they needed to take up the slack. Harriet Hall, the chief executive of Jefferson Mental Health Center, says facilities like hers sometimes got a boost from the state when the hospitals’ budgets were cut. But often, they got nothing. “It was never like, we’ll just transfer this money to the communities from the hospi-
tals,” says Hall. Hall and others who lead the state’s 17 nonprofit community mental health centers say that with adequate funding they can provide much better services than the large institutions ever did — by giving the routine care people need to stay integrated within the community and out of costly hospital stays. But, they say, there are gaps in the services they can realistically provide, given their tight budgets. “There’s still kind of a dearth of options for folks who have genuinely long-term needs, and (whose illnesses are) a bit more severe than nursing home placement or return to home allows,” says Liz Hickman, who heads the Centennial Mental Health Center, which serves rural communities in northeastern Colorado. What’s more, nonprofit community mental health centers say state funding doesn’t provide for the treatment of those without some form of public or private insurance or other payment source. Randy Stith, who heads the Aurora Mental Health Center, says that leaves them with no choice but to tell indigent patients to go to the emergency room for care. “We’re referring people to the emergency
room off the streets pretty regularly,” says Stith. “It’s costly but that’s what you do.” At Denver Health, Colwell describes having to board psychiatric patients in the emergency room. On a typical night, as many as 10 or 15 beds may be taken up by people who are waiting for psychiatric services, while the psychiatrists on staff at the hospital are overwhelmed with other cases. Those who pose a risk to themselves or others may be admitted to the psychiatric emergency department. Dr. Kimberly Nordstrom, the medical director of that department, says more and more of the patients she sees don’t have primary care providers. That often means that she can’t prescribe medications — with their uncertain side effects and tailored dosing needs — even to those who are very ill. “I can’t start medicine with somebody who’s not going to be seen for six months,” Nordstrom explains. Others, says Colwell, are at the brink of posing a risk to the community or themselves — but aren’t there yet. “Once their physical problems are taken care of, we can’t keep them,” says Colwell. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be coming back.
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