'Tom'* has had a difficult life. His schizophrenic illness has not responded to known medical treatments. Many of them have further harmed his health. For 25 years he has suffered with the ebb & flow of his psychosis intensity. Doctors have tried massive doses, experimental techniques, and have given up. Often Tom has departed from institutions in worse shape than he entered them. Last Fall, Tom's family sought to get a Canadian County court to order him into yet another psychiatric treatment intervention. The family contacted law enforcement repeatedly, and were routinely told that; "Until he poses a threat to others, they cannot act." Tom evidently did finally cross that 'line' and someone filed a criminal complaint, saying Tom made a threatening action. Tom was then arrested and put in the Canadian County Jail. The county has no mental health court. Oklahoma has only 16 counties (out of 77) with a separate preemptive process for the seriously mentally ill. If your loved one gets seriously ill, get them to one of these 16 counties. Those 16 counties have a system set up for the mentally ill whereby a special court process can address a serious mental illness. |
Oklahoma lawmakers no longer require that the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health & Substance Abuse Services (ODMHSAS) provide a minimum capacity of public mental health treatment 'beds'. So the department cut the capacity several years ago and never asked for the money to restore the constitutional role. Under the state constitution. For the last 5 years, Commissioner Terri White has asked for hundreds of millions more, but did not designate a single dime to restoring inpatient acute care capacity. This year, White asked for $200 million more for her agency, yet she did not ask that a penny more in new facility or operation money to expand how many the state can treat in the public facilities. Her agency was reformed 20 years ago and combined with the substance abuse outreach effort. It has never been audited since, and no internal audit report exists at the State Auditor's office. The legislature has not directed any funding mandates to the agency, nor received accounting of the non-appropriated income sources, such as real estate they rent out or sold. the agency had a policy of not billing insurance for several years, but that has recently been changed. Time For A Performance Audit The House Speaker and the Senate President have the constitutional authority to call for a performance audit of ODMHSAS. It is a long-overdue necessity. After years of cutting inpatient beds first, then never even asking to restore that core function; it appears that the agency is largely avoiding it's constitutional purpose. Nearly 20 years ago, Gov. Keating & the legislature ordered that Eastern State Psychiatric Hospital be closed permanently. It used to house 2600 patients. Central State Psychiatric (Griffin Memorial) has closed most of their buildings and rents out much of their remaining campus to corporate mental health providers. But judges and police cannot access those corporate facilities, even though Oklahoma Taxpayers built those buildings. The Oklahoma Mental Health Statutes (Section 43A) allow the ODMHSAS to rent out or sell their agency campuses without even reporting the financial data to the legislature. The department has never undergone a performance audit by the State Auditor. Even though the agency collects rents, files health insurance claims on the people they treat, and disperses the bulk of their budget to corporate providers in the form of grants or other contractual 'partnerships' to provide care to the public. The legislature appropriated about $427 million to the ODMHSAS agency last year. Not one dime was earmarked toward public beds for acute mental health care. The agency does offer their corporate partners a reimbursement of $495 per day for such beds. If we can assume that the agency spends that same rate on their own operation, then 300 beds would incur an expense of $43.8 million. That's just roughly 10% of the appropriated state funds! When you consider the federal reimbursement and matching money, and the non-appropriated money that agency acquires through their land and real estate ventures, they are certainly spending less than 10% of their agency budget on this core function. So when the commissioner tells a district court judge that she must let a severely ill man rot in jail for 6 months because of a waiting list she created through her own agency's misappropriations... She ought to be truly declared IN CONTEMPT! ODMHSAS In Contempt of Mentally Ill & County Sheriffs
By shutting down foundational services to the state, ODMHSAS is forcing cities and counties to deal with psychotic meltdowns as criminal acts. Only a state court judge can legally order psychiatric intervention, and only in a public psychiatric facility. In the past 30 years our state has shut down over 90 percent of our public beds. This is not only contempt for county sheriffs who now must house the ill, but it's also cruel contempt for the mentally ill, themselves. It is a systematic abuse of their civil rights. Federal and municipal law has no such constitutional power to intervene. But without a state infrastructure to administrate and operate treatment, even a state judge's order goes unheeded. Last April, Commissioner White organized a rally at the capitol rotunda for mental health awareness. she invited the widow, Cathy Costello, to speak. Cathy's husband, Labor Commissioner Mark Costello, had recently been murdered by his schizophrenic son. We agree passionately with Cathy Costello, that Oklahoma's mental health system is broken. and we hold Terri White responsible for much of the failure. She obviously is putting many other priorities above the care for those in acute crisis and rotting away in jails because she won't prioritize beds.
We call on the legislature to mandate a line-item for funding public mental health bed capacity, so individuals in crisis are treated humanely, and not criminally, just for getting sick. We call on the legislature to step in to relieve county sheriffs of a massive budget crisis brought about by the ODMHSAS failure to fund this constitutional function of state government.
After hearing the full presentation, a prominent Tulsa social justice warrior said something to the effect of "they built a facility for the men but not for the women... that will definitely result in a lawsuit.". Others standing by concurred. They seemed certain that women were being blatantly underserved. But if they were really using the good senses that most of the mental health advocates around them exercised, they'd have been asking; "Why are men being arrested for mental breakdowns at a rate of 10 times that of women?" Men & women develop serious mental illness at relatively similar rates. Mania, and Psychotic Major Depression are certainly as relevant for women. But police seem to find a pretense for arrest more often when a man has a psychotic meltdown. this is dispite the fact that the mentally ill are no more violent than the population as a whole. Infact, they are more vulnerable to being a victim than the general public. I think this says more about our societal fears than our realistic response to actual public dangers. Many of the 'sociologists' on the left still believe that it is impossible for a member of a racial minority to be a racist, because they reason that a minority never attains the power to enact racist behavior. But we have to put away our preset presumptions when we seek to attack the social ills around us. Because sometime's we fall ill to the very sickness we label others with.
If you're confused by social security disability forms, you might lose your gun rights. The Obama Administration came up with a reasoning for telling the Social Security Administration to flag any confused senior or applicant for disability benefits, who requests extra assistance with understanding the forms and process; may be to be deemed mentally defective and therefor a serious public safety risk. This order would direct clerical staff at the Social Security Administration to flag that applicant and have their name added to the national instant check(NICS), so they could no longer make most firearms purchases.
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Sooner Politics
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