My new local news source

So State Hospital has been a flurry of local interest over the past few days.

First, there was an article splashed across the front of the City and State section of the N&O yesterday (I guess it was a little too much to hope that this was front-page worthy news, being about crazy people and all, although they've done it before) about how the county is now fighting to keep State Hospital open. It was a very revealing article. For a few years now, according to folks in my program, the plan has been to close SH and move everyone to the new place they're building about 50 minutes north of here. Allegedly, or at least if you believe the website, it was going to be soooo much cheaper to build the new hospital and merge State Hospital and Other State Hospital than to revitalize either of the old ones.

But apparently, the reason it's so damn cheap is because, oh, the new hospital has waaaaaay too few beds to actually house the patients. Like, it's a couple hundred short. And that assumes that the system works as it is, and won't need to expand again. I.e., the new place has a mere 432 beds. State Hospital, at capacity and with all of its mojo working, can house three thousand (yeah, it's a huge place. There are several towns smaller than that in this state). We have more patients than that now, and our acute units are always on delay because we're full. And that doesn't even take into account the addition of all the patients over at Other State Hospital.

Oops. Dang it.

And then, last night, one of the local news stations set aside a whole half hour and aired their original documentary, Focal Point: State of Minds, about the general problems of mental health care in the state of NC. Which, frankly, generalizes reasonably well to the state of mental health care in America. If you've got 22 minutes to spare, I highly recommend clicking the link and watching it, even if you aren't in the business of crazy (go ahead, you can knit while you watch). It's actually very well done - we were all a little worried that it would have a tremendous political agenda, as the station that aired it usually has pretty heavy political leanings. But I think it's very fair, remarkable in its scope for being so short, and overall a good picture of the flaws in the system. I'm not sure it accurately represents the shit we deal with at the level of those providers left to pick up the pieces, but, again, only 20 minutes. I also liked that they left it on a reasonably optimistic note, but what I found particularly heartening is how they continually emphasized the point that mental patients, well, they're people, who want to live life like other people, who have families that love them, and really have a tremendous burden to deal with. They're people who are sick and often could be helped by relatively simple means, if they could actually get a few reasonable things that they need. Not automatically scary, weird, or needing to be shunned or forgotten or marginalized. Who are and can be productive members of society. Really, they're just people, people.

I think we as a society tend to forget that sometimes.

Anyhow, it'll be interesting to see what comes of this. A lot of the staff seemed to breathe a collective, if premature, sigh of relief yesterday. No one really wants the hospital to close, I'm coming to understand. And not because everyone's afraid of losing their jobs, because they aren't, and not because it's so far away, and not because it's going to be a giant pain in the ass to actually institute this whole move. But because a lot of people at State Hospital actually have a lot of pride in what they do, and because of the very long and rather important history of what's been done there.

And that's nice. And reassuring, especially when Asshole Attending is constantly discharging people early from the medical unit because they're disruptive and weird, or when he and I, um, don't see eye to eye about psychiatric issues (I'll tell you the what happened today in another post, some other time. Right now I'm still busy being appalled at his cruelty).

As an aside, the person who's been feeding me much of this information (with great enthusiasm and ardor) is our respiratory therapist, who turns out to be a wealth of knowledge. Case in point, I'm sitting at the nurses' station a couple weeks ago, writing a note, chatting with said RT, when he looks at me sort of quizzically and says, "Hey, isn't there a line of sex toys named after you?"

Who knew?