From Willamette Week, April 22 2009
Local mental health and addiction services and state prisons aren’t the only potential budget cuts that could make life more brutish in Portland.
The potential loss of several key programs at the state Department of Human Services is truly sobering.
Following is a list of six programs that would be lost from DHS’ addictions and mental health division in a worst-case, 30-percent-cut scenario:
• Eliminating acute inpatient psychiatric care for nearly 6,000 adults.
• Eliminating 24-hour psychiatric community crisis services. About 15,200 use these services each year.
• Eliminating adult outpatient mental health services for 2,925 adults per year who are not eligible for Medicaid.
• Eliminating alcohol and drug prevention programs for more than
1,500 families per biennium.
• Eliminating problem gambling prevention and treatment that 3,700 clients access every year.
As usual, it’s the mentally ill that get the bigger cuts, but also these are the people that affect all of us the most. My husband just had a psychotic break a month ago and killed his cat in a very brutal way. He is in the state hospital in Portland. When medicated, he is the sweetest man. He is gentle, loving, almost a genius, and extremely talented in computer programming and music.
But, with these cuts, people like him will just end up on the street until they hear a voice that tells them to jump off a bridge or kill somthing/someone. When that happens, the outcome is either a grieving family or many grieving families and a lifetime sentence in Salem. Either way, the state pays!
Mental health patients deserve the chance to be successful people. I would happily give a few more dollars out of each paycheck if I were sure it would go to the people that need it.
I am so sorry to hear what’s going on with you, bikegal. He’s lucky to have you. Genius and madness accompany each other far too often, and society doesn’t handle either very well.
We fund the criminal justice system with one hand while taking funds away from the mental health system with the other. There are some really mean, selfish people in this world who prefer funding the punishment of “criminals” for their own safety rather than aid the sick or poor.
Throwing the mentally ill in jail for acting out their illness is akin to throwing paraplegics in jail for using wheelchairs in public. It is a violation of our civil rights to yank our healthcare and then criminalize our illness.
Unfortunately, the mentally ill, like children, have difficulty fighting their own battles. Hopefully people who have been affected by our struggles will go to bat for us.