Expert: Hospital closings put mentally ill at risk

Gov. Strickland announced the closings of psychiatric hospitals in Dayton and Cambridge.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Closing two of the state’s nine psychiatric hospitals in a budget-cutting move will weaken critical family support for patients, make it more difficult to ensure their success once they are released and lead to more mentally ill people on the streets, a mental-health expert said Friday.

Gov. Ted Strickland announced that the Ohio Department of Mental Health will close the Dayton campus of Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare and Appalachian Behavioral Healthcare in Cambridge by July as part of an effort to cut more than $733 million from the budget.

The closures announced Thursday will force the transfer of scores of patients and create an uncertain future for several hundred employees.

“My understanding is that the director of mental health felt that these two institutions were not at capacity and were among the least efficient,” Strickland said.

The 153-year-old Dayton hospital, which serves 14 counties, has 110 beds and employs about 200 workers. There are 48 beds and 130 employees at the Cambridge facility in eastern Ohio.

Patients at the Dayton hospital will be transferred to state hospitals in Cincinnati, Columbus and Toledo. Patients at Cambridge will move to a facility in Athens in southeast Ohio.

The Dayton hospital serves low-income patients who are the most chronically mentally ill, with serious disorders such as schizophrenia, said Jennifer Davis-Berman, professor of social work at the University of Dayton. For those patients, she said, family support is crucial to their treatment and moving patients farther away will reduce that support.

“It’s a horrible blow,” she said. “That’s really going to degrade the ability of families and friends to support their loved ones.”

Davis-Berman said moving the patients farther from their family’s homes will make it harder for the hospitals to find them housing and to check up on them when they are released.

“There is a very acute need for these facilities in these communities,” she said. “I’m afraid that this lack of treatment option will lead to more people being on the streets.”

Joseph Szoke, executive director of the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board of Montgomery County, said visitors will have farther to drive, as willdeputy sheriffs who transport patients placed in state hospitals under court order.

Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin said she’s troubled not only by the loss of jobs, but by the impact on people with mental illness.

“Many of the issues we face in Dayton, including the homeless situation, are related to mental health,” McLin said. “How do you fight the state, when they are doing what they have to do in these trying economic times?”

Opened in 1855 as the Southern Ohio Lunatic Asylum, the Dayton facility was later known as Dayton State Hospital and Dayton Mental Health Center.

The hospital has been reduced from 2,000 patients and 77 buildings on 1,000 acres in the 1960s to 110 patients on about 100 acres today. New drug therapies and efforts to treat people in less restrictive outpatient settings have slashed the rolls.

The state has gotten rid of most of the hospital grounds, often for a nominal fee. The main building is now a retirement center, the former hospital farm is a research park, and other hospital land is currently the site of a hospice and private homes.