An Abject Failure

Anyone who care about good government, responsible leadership, wise public policy and human decency will be outraged by a series of investigative reports appearing in The News & Observer of Raleigh.

Called "Mental Disorder: The Failure of Reform," the project charts how North Carolina's attempt to overhaul its mental health system went terribly wrong and left that system and the people and families who depend on it much worse off.

From the overview article:

North Carolina's mental-health reform was supposed to improve treatment for the mentally ill and provide good value for taxpayers. It has done neither.

The state has wasted at least $400 million in an ill-conceived and poorly executed plan to treat more mentally ill people in their own communities and fewer in the state's four psychiatric hospitals, a News & Observer investigation shows.

Local governments, forced to stop offering treatment, were replaced by providers out to make a profit. Most of their workers were high school graduates, not licensed professionals, but the bill was stunning. In a few months, the cost of the community support program was $50 million a month, more than 10 times what the state had expected.

[snip]

Meanwhile, some seriously ill people had to do without treatment. Services that were more likely to help them avoid hospitalization were in short supply.