By Annmarie Timmins
The Concord Monitor
Originally published March 10, 2013
During his 1971 inaugural address, then-Gov. Walter Peterson identified seven goals for his next term. First on the Republican’s list was improving mental health care.
Peterson wanted to stop warehousing people with mental illness at the state’s psychiatric hospital and begin treating them in local communities. “A state mental institution,” Peterson told lawmakers 42 years ago, “is, more than anything else, a symbol of failure to help people in time.”
Two decades later, the state had become a national leader in mental health care by beginning what Peterson had envisioned. Lawmakers had established 10 community mental health centers and put money into local housing and local treatment. And under the leadership of then-Gov. John H. Sununu, the state had opened a modern 316-bed state hospital in place of the 19th-century-era institution, once called the New Hampshire Asylum for the Insane, that had housed nearly 2,000 people.
At the time, Donald Shumway, then director of the state’s Division of Mental Health, said the national recognition showed “our plan is really heading in the right direction.”
The acclaim would be short-lived.
Today, everyone from mental health advocates to lawmakers to Gov. Maggie Hassan describe the state’s mental health system as broken.
In a scathing 2011 critique, the federal government said mental health care here is “in crisis.” Federal officials accused the state of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by starving the community care system in favor of unnecessary hospitalization. Last year, several patients made the same allegation in a federal lawsuit against the state that the federal government has joined.
Meanwhile, people in crisis languish in emergency rooms, sometimes for days, waiting for a hospital bed. The state’s jails and prisons have become the new mental health “‘asylum,” with an estimated 65 percent of the state prison population having a mental illness, according to a prison spokesman.
The entire article is here.
