An Editorial...Yesterday, Commissioner Terri White held a well-orchestrated press event. State media covered it thoroughly. It was well done and masterful. White knows how this chess match is done and she carefully made her best move. My take... These are draconian threats, but I believe the real Mental health cuts will be in State mental hospitals. Oklahoma used to have 5000 beds in the state hospital. They now have 349. The agency seems to not want to really run hospitals. They seem to be willing to privatize that function.... which is why the county jails and state prisons are left to do much of the real mental health care... at a far higher cost to human lives and state treasury. IF Commissioner White would amend agency contracts so that all corporate hospital contracts REQUIRED accepting court-ordered individuals and police psychiatric detentions, then I'd be far more supportive. I expressed that to her personally. We have over 1000 mentally ill in jails only because there wasn't a bed available for a cop to bring them to for a psych evaluation. Tulsa county jail, alone; has twice the mentally ill patients as all state mental hospitals.... COMBINED! I have spent hours discussing this problem directly with Commissioner White and her top administrators. We don't see 'eye to eye' on what's best for the taxpayer and the severely ill. She's doing what's best for her agency, and that's not the same as what's best for Oklahoma. | White closed up over half of Griffin Memorial Hospital and leased out the buildings to her corporate partners. Mental Health Courts don't have authority to order corporations to take in the mentally ill.. so there's a long waiting list. |
Walton County FL - When news of the arrest of Terri White (The Oklahoma Commissioner of Mental Health & Substance Abuse Services) hit the media circuit, White went into 'damage control' mode. She made several statements to select media outlets and provided a narrative of her interstate advocacy of her department's Crisis Intervention Training. This was a weak effort to deflect from her own gross failure to put her own CIT training into practice. We have no indication from law enforcement that there was any intoxication involved in this incident. Only Terri White's vague implication that her brother was drunk. Here is the officer's report. Now, for any family dealing with a drug-abusing member, it is very difficult to continue suffering the pain that their personal behavior inflicts on the whole family... especially when special family events are forever ruined. Having said that, it's still very disappointing that White did not own up to her own dangerous behavior. And for the Walton County Sheriff's Dept. It was completely unacceptable that she would seek to embarrass Sheriff Adkinson's department. I know this is not how White wants her department to be a convenient scapegoat.
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.
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Sooner Politics
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