How Colorado has neglected its seriously mentally ill.
tells us that mental illness is a medical problem, like heart disease or diabetes. But people with mental illness are not treated the same way that people with other medical diseases are treated, especially those with severe mental illness, and particularly in Colorado. In 2022, Colorado is ranked 51st of all states and the District of Columbia for access to mental-health care for adults, according to the national advocacy group Mental Health America.
Amy says that her son’s health only began to improve when he understood that medications he was taking for his schizophrenia were helping him. Amy’s son cycled through a familiar pattern in Colorado of being too ill to advocate for himself at a public mental-health center, being turned loose from that center, becoming homeless, and being helped by her, which resulted in his assault of her and his spending almost a year in jail.
Long-term in-patient care facilities are where many of the state’s SMI patients need to be. If they can become more independent, so much the better. But the likelihood that they will experience “recovery,” a buzzword at public mental-health centers, is limited, considering that without medication and counseling, their conditions and their sense of themselves as potentially well people significantly deteriorates.
Those who hawk the system for any expansion of in-patient psychiatric beds are convinced we won’t see more beds without a legislative mandate. We may have to create new funding streams by re-examining tax limitations created by existing legislation. We may have to rethink state budget allocations in favor of in-patient psychiatric care. We may have to scour existing services provided by public mental-health centers to include more in-patient care for SMI clients.
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