Nev. mental health patients bused and crimes followed
By Cynthia Hubert and Phillip Reese, Sacramento Bee
Six months after he was discharged to a Greyhound bus and shipped out of Las Vegas, one former patient of Nevada’s primary hospital for mentally ill people stabbed a man to death in Iowa.
Another former patient, responding to voices in his head, set off explosions in a grocery store and a doughnut shop in Tennessee just a month after Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas gave him a one-way ticket to Knoxville in July 2012.
Nevada bused yet another Rawson-Neal patient, a convicted child molester, to San Diego in 2011, even as he faced criminal charges in Las Vegas for failing to register as a sex offender. He also failed to register in San Diego, where he disappeared into the streets and soon became the target of a citywide manhunt.
Yet another former Rawson-Neal patient was found dead, his body floating in the American River near a homeless camp, seven months after he received a Greyhound ticket to Sacramento courtesy of the state of Nevada.
Even as Nevada’s embattled state mental hospital works to revamp operations, the fallout from its aggressive busing policies continues to resonate from California to Florida.
Hospitals are forced to be legally responsible for ‘patients’, yet they cannot forcibly medicate or restrain them.
What’s wrong with this picture? Damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Since almost none of those folks is actually from NV, I can see why the state facilities would try to send them ‘home’. Trouble is, there are too many lawyers trying to make work for themselves and sue the state on behalf of the ‘victims.’
Why is the word patients in quotes and why is your worldview so twisted?
The problem doesn’t start with the lawyers.
Sure you could shift the discussion away from the real issue of our failed healthcare system, and blame the lawyers. And of course they are a problem. But fixing the lawyers doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
Cosa, for some they must be directly negatively impacted for perspective to take hold. That is, most of the blind right. All the blustering about gun rights, excessive paranoid government control, blame game nonsense is just low quality junk- food puke. Dogula, if you or someone you love was a direct victim of these discharges, you would have a new, better understanding. You would care. You do not currently care for the wreckage that has ensued with OTHER people’s lives but simply turn on the blame show. It is an undeveloped thought, an immature position and sadly we have a country full of people that think freedom and social responsibility are mutually exclusive.
Oh and by the way, we are the laughing stock of the developed world with this crazy, non-sensical healthcare ‘system’ we have.
I love how all these lefties attack the person they think I am, instead of the point of the article.
I am not the issue here, violent, possibly mentally ill people ARE.
By the way, how many of you are aware that the Centennial school shooter, Karl Pierson, was an avowed socialist? Anyone? Anyone?
It’s a sad commentary on our society when our mental health care and prison systems have devolved into such a heartless, dysfunctional and dangerous clusterfudge. These problems will never be solved until we eliminate the profit motive from these systems. None of these problems can be solved by our current pseudo-capitalist free market approaches because there’s no money to be made. Like so many things that are wrong with this country, the way we treat our fellow citizens who are mentally ill is another ugly stain on the Reagan legacy of uncaring greed. http://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_legacy_violence_the_homeless_mental_illness/
The latest story in a tragically long line of gun violence involving Karl Pierson in Colorado, contains some anecdotal evidence that he liked to debate politics and often supported communist ideas and wore Soviet Union hammer/sickle t-shirts occasionally. Communism, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with anyone that posts here on LTN who may support some highly successful policies used in the rest of the industrialized world when it comes to single-payer healthcare. You’d have to be completely misinformed about the differences between communism and democratic-socialism or just a willfully ignorant, sociopathic harridan to think that.
There is plenty of blame to go around regarding the sad state of affairs of the mentally ill.
Reagan and the Democrats agreed that the mental hospitals should be closed, but for different reasons. Reagan and the Republicans wanted to shrink government and save money and the Democrats wanted to free the mentally ill. Some liberals actually argued that mental illness was a normal response to our repressive government.
The sad result is that the mentally ill are free to roam the streets refusing treatment and those that want treatment can’t get it.
I hope the focus on Nevada’s policies toward mental health patients doesn’t cause people to think the problem is limited to one state. Mental health patients who don’t have health insurance are inadequately treated and actively mistreated all over the country, if not the world.
This should not be a political issue. Compassionate care ought not to be withheld for any reason.