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Letter: Two beds per 100K citizens? That’s crazy
Op-Ed · May 25, 2017
How can a state which is first in literacy be last in mental health services?
That’s not a rhetorical question, and it deserves better than the obvious answer which is that we care about literacy, but we don’t care about crazy people. And before the enlightened jump on me about my word choice, I take my meaning from “No One Cares About Crazy People” the title of a new book by Ron Powers whose schizophrenic son, Kevin, hanged himself in 2005. Powers, in turn, took his title from an email Kelly M. Rindfleisch, deputy chief of staff to then Milwaukee county executive Scott Walker, wrote in 2010. At that time, Milwaukee county hospital was in the news for allegations for mismanagement of its mental health complex, and Walker was concerned the scandal would be an issue in his campaign for Governor.
Powers doesn’t say if the Walker campaign was taken to task for the remark — certainly it didn’t derail his campaign; nor was it an issue in his recall election in 2012. Or perhaps he was confronted and got by the way Trump and House leader Kevin McCarthy did recently by dismissing their remarks as attempts “at humor gone wrong.”
But there’s nothing funny about the plight of the mentally ill in Wisconsin, and here in Iowa we are dead last for state psychiatric beds per capita at two beds per 100,000 adults. The average wait time for a child to receive mental health services is 21 months.
It may have been an offhand remark but if how we allocate our money and legislate policy is indicative of our priorities, we don’t care much about those among us battling mental illness, or, by extension, our homeless, as these populations overlap significantly. Additionally, decreases in mental health services lead to increased entanglements between law enforcement and the mentally ill, so in that regard we don’t care much about police safety either.
I don’t know if there’s any empirical evidence that our judicial system is doing a better job than our health care system, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest so. Ask Joan Becker, whose schizophrenic son killed his football coach in 2009. Only after Mark Becker was “sentenced to life” did he get the treatment he needed despite years of advocacy by his parents. Or ask the parents and sister of Chase Nicholson. Oh wait, you can’t. Chase shot them to death last month after they couldn’t find a hospital that would let him stay for more than 24 hours.
To the best of his ability, Governor Branstad has run Iowa like a business. He closed two of the Iowa’s four mental health institutions in 2015. Some have argued it was illegal for him to do so, but what really matters is that he did so without a safety net, confident the private sector would rise up to supply the demand. It hasn’t happened, and mostly as a consequence of government regulations. A proposed mental health bill sponsored by state Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, a Republican, has met with fierce resistance and the government-appointed Certificate of Need Board has thrice denied permission for a proposed facility in Scott County even though the need is obvious and palpable.
This week, Kim Reynolds takes the oath of office and becomes Iowa’s first female governor, but it’s none too early to let her, as well as your state representative, know that we shouldn’t even think about closing the facilities at Cherokee and Independence. What we should do is review and revise the mission of the Certificate of Need Board, encourage expansion of both public and private facilities and require all of them to use Match Care, a computerized registry of available beds. Oh, and perhaps we should do something about that two beds per 100,000 adults ratio, because that statistic is just plain crazy.
I am a veteran high school teacher, trained and experienced in suicide prevention.
Jane Purcell
West Branch
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