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EDITORIAL: Indiana making welcome shift in treatment of mentally ill

South Bend Tribune - 8/16/2016

Aug. 16--It's been decades since Indiana's mental hospitals were used to warehouse the mentally ill, some for as long as two to three years at a time.

But when the state began deinstitutionalizing the hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s, many of those former patients were released into communities that weren't prepared to receive them. They ended up on the streets with drug and alcohol addictions and, eventually, back in nursing homes, jails or prisons.

As Dr. John J. Wernert, secretary of Indiana'sFamily and Social Services Administration, explained during a meeting with The Tribune's Editorial Board last week, Indiana's prisons house 30,000 inmates, 40 percent of whom have a mental illness or addiction problem.

Wernert, the first physician to lead the FSSA, said the state is changing its approach to how mentally ill patients are treated. It's a change that is long overdue and given the enormity of the task, one that will take some time.

That change is starting with programs such as Recovery Works, which works to increase availability of mental health treatment and recovery services in the community to those who may otherwise face incarceration. Right now, there are 3,300 felons in the program.

The state also is constructing a new 159-bed, $120 million state hospital in Indianapolis that will focus on diagnosing problems early in illnesses, treating those illnesses and supporting patients as they enter community-based care.

"We have to reconnect the continuum of care that's been disconnected for 20 years," Wernert said.

Laurie Nafziger, president and CEO of Oaklawn Psychiatric Center, said the shift from institutions and hospitals to a more community- and home-based care is working. "It's effective and is where people want to be," Nafziger said. Keeping state hospitals is important though because there are patients who require more care than can be provided at the local level.

Oaklawn, which serves St. Joseph and Elkhart counties, has 36 beds allocated for use at state hospitals. "In the meantime, we do everything we can to try and maintain them in the community," Nafziger said. "We've learned a lot over the years about daily support and tending to people."

It's clear simply warehousing the mentally ill as a way of keeping them off the streets isn't working. The state is shifting treatment of the mentally ill to more of a community-based model, and that's a good first step. But local communities must commit to providing the kinds of services the mentally ill need.

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