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Nevada Is Allegedly Deporting Its Mentally Ill Residents

A bus ticket to a strange city and just enough pills for the ride. Compassion.

The mental health "debate" in the U.S., spurred on by you know, has officially gone from vaguely hopeful—for boosted services, better understanding, etc.—to terrifying. It should never have been hopeful, of course, as that call for action has been typically coming from the same group of congressional Republicans that believe expanded health care access is the end of the world. And by “mental health care” what was mainly meant in the first place was putting people with mental illnesses on various lists so that they can be presumed dangerous for the rest of their lives.

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I have a vague fear that a real possible outcome of the American right-wing’s mental health diversionary tactic is going back in time to when kids called each other “schizos” as a dis and mental illness existed not within a multidimensional spectrum but as the dark and untrustworthy side of a binary, with “normal” on the other. It so happens that painting large and diverse sets of people as dangerous to a mythic “us” is one of the chief talents of the right-wing. It probably doesn’t help much that this regression is more or less supported by a rising tide of New Age cool kids who like to imagine that mental health is not the domain of medicine in the first place.

The above is a rant simply because it’s impossible to read this The New York Times piece without ranting. It’s terrifying, with no exaggeration: the state of Nevada is simply getting rid of its homeless mentally ill population, shipping them off. The city of San Francisco is now suing the state on behalf of 24 mentally ill and homeless patients it alleges were removed from state psychiatric centers and bussed to SF, only to be left with no medication on the streets of a strange city.

The San Francisco city attorney, Dennis Herrera, says those 24 are just a small sampling of some 1,500 people sent from Nevada to places all over the country. The Times continues:

Rumors of such journeys had become part of California homeless lore.

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“In San Francisco, it’s been urban myth for decades that this sort of practice was going on,” Mr. Herrera said. “But this is the first instance that I am aware of where we have been able to document a state-supported and state-sanctioned effort.”

Ms. Woods, the spokeswoman for Nevada’s health agency, said that from July 1, 2008, to March 31, the state bought out-of-state bus tickets for 4.7 percent of the patients it discharged, an estimated 1,473 people. “The findings show there were 10 instances in the course of five years where there was not enough documentation to know for certain if staff confirmed there was housing/shelter and supportive services at the destination,” she said.

The state says the deportations are part of a program that exists in many places besides Nevada, called Client Transportation Back to Home Communities. It exists to help reconnect patients with their families and other theoretical support networks. Herrera alleges that in practice, patients are often sent to locations arbitrarily or nearly arbitrarily. Nevada, naturally, claims otherwise: with a couple of exceptions, all of those 1,500 people were going to safe places where the patients had support networks. "Home."

There is, by the way, a euphemism for this practice: "Greyhound therapy."

@everydayelk