In 2011, Pennsylvania officials wrote a plan for how the state would move boldly into a bright future where local communities, not state institutions, would provide care and support for residents with serious mental health needs.
It was an optimistic and ambitious plan, a vision for decades to come, and a roadmap to fulfilling a federal requirement to build a country that wouldn’t lock people away because of treatable illnesses.
But in Pennsylvania’s plan, the drafters also included a dire warning, a vision for the future should they fail.
“The fiscal and social costs of failing to provide necessary supports and services — increased homelessness, unemployment, incarceration, and clinical relapse and de-compensation — far exceed the costs of paying for the needed services.”
This series is about that premonition coming true.
Pennsylvania’s program to shut down state hospital beds and spend the money in the community is now being used instead to open more of the most restrictive mental health beds.
Cuts to the state’s mental health budgets in 2013 were never restored, leaving counties with too few resources to care for those who need it most.
As counties do less with less, the state’s local jails have seen an increase both in the number of detainees needing mental health services and the seriousness of their need, even as jail populations have declined.
Spotlight PA focuses on one family’s torturous journey through this broken system, and how the cost is borne by the people it’s meant to serve.
