The Ideal Scene For a State Department of Mental Health
An Ideal Scene expresses the way an area ought to be. In other words, if you had your “druthers” (“I’d rather…”) what would things look like and how would they operate in the best of all possible worlds? We can state unequivocally that the scene in most state mental health departments and facilities is abominable. If they were really doing their jobs right, their patients would be recovering and being sent, sane, back into society as productive individuals. It doesn’t take much research to find out that isn’t the case, just Google “psychiatric abuse.”
In Missouri, for example, the annual budget for the state department of mental health is well over $1 billion. It has been generally increasing for the last thirty-seven years while state psychiatric facilities continue to abuse their patients. In fact, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch exposed the outrageous level of abuse in Missouri psychiatric facilities in a series of articles called “Broken Promises, Broken Lives” published June 11-14, 2006. They said, “Mentally retarded and mentally ill people in Missouri have been sexually assaulted, beaten, injured and left to die by abusive and neglectful caregivers in a system that for years has failed at every level to safeguard them.”
Similar situations can be found in other states. For example, on December 30, 2007 the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published “A Hidden Shame: Danger And Death In Georgia’s Mental Hospitals” saying that “despite intense scrutiny, conditions are still substandard for many patients in seven state facilities.” Read more