Mental Health System – Ohio

Posted on October 25, 2010 by townsend

• ‘An illusion of treatment’, By Alan Johnson and Catherine Candisky, October 24, 2010, Columbus Dispatch: “Ohio’s mental-health system, once a national model, is on the verge of collapse as the state careens toward the biggest budget crisis in memory. Thousands have been slashed from the mental-health-care rolls. Others might have to wait months to see a psychiatrist. State funding for mental-health services has been decimated, Medicaid is gobbling up scarce local dollars, and hundreds of small group homes for the mentally ill have closed. Prisons, nursing facilities and homeless shelters are the new homes for thousands of mentally ill Ohioans, advocates say…”
• 1988 act worked well, for a few years, By Catherine Candisky, October 24, 2010, Columbus Dispatch: “July 1, 1988, wasn’t a holiday, but Maureen Corcoran didn’t sleep the night before. ‘It was like New Year’s Eve because July 1 was the beginning of the Mental Health Act,’ said Corcoran, now Ohio’s Medicaid director, then a deputy director for the Department of Mental Health and former executive assistant to former Gov. Richard F. Celeste. ‘Nothing happened on July 1, but that’s how excited we were.’ The Mental Health Act of 1988, signed by Celeste on March 28 that year, was a watershed in Ohio’s treatment of the mentally ill. After decades of inadequate treatment, marked by tragic stories of patients unserved, mistreated or chained in hospital wards, the state was dawning a new day. Patients could leave the hospitals (or avoid going there in the first place), return to their home communities, and receive treatment, housing, transportation and other services coordinated by 53 community mental-health boards. Most important, the state funds that had paid for their hospitalization would follow them home, assuring the availability of critical restorative services…”