Special unit to move mental patients under consideration in SC

COLUMBIA, S.C.

Overhauling how South Carolina handles mental patients who must be brought to hospitals under the order of a doctor or a court is a more difficult problem than they expected, a group of senators said.

Sen. Marlon Kimpson began working on the bill in fall, just weeks after two mental-health patients drowned in the back of a locked police van while being moved during Hurricane Florence.

But the piecemeal system put into place 60 years ago to move at most a few thousand patients between massive mental intuitions is broken as county sheriff’s offices bear most of the burden of crisscrossing the state with an estimated 15,000 patients a year.

The latest idea discussed at a subcommittee meeting was creating an expanded police unit under the Department of Mental Health, based in several regions across South Carolina. Those officers would be in a Therapeutic Transport Unit, specially trained to deal with people suffering from a mental crisis.

The unit likely would include a mental-health professional to assess if patients are a danger to themselves or the public and need to be restrained or locked away, or if they can be taken unrestrained or even by a family member to treatment.

Associated Press