New Orleans Facing Mental Health Crisis

Facilities Damaged During Hurricane Katrina Has City Struggling To Treat Patients

(AP)  Authorities say they are still struggling to deal with the mentally ill in New Orleans, more than two years after Hurricane Katrina washed away a massive mental hospital that has yet to be replaced.

Earlier this month, a woman who police said had been living in her car and showed signs of losing touch with reality walked into a vocational college classroom and began firing.

Latina Williams bought a .357 revolver and box of ammunition from a New Orleans pawn shop, investigators say. She then went to Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge, walked into a classroom, killed two women, reloaded and then killed herself.

Two weeks earlier, a man described by New Orleans police as a mentally ill vagrant allegedly wrestled a gun from a police officer and shot her to death.

The suspect's family said he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with violent tendencies when he was 19. Homeless and bounced around mental facilities, he is now at Orleans Parish Prison.

He has plenty of company there.

In post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, where hospitals are still not operating at capacity, the prison's 60 psychiatric beds make it the largest acute-care psychiatric facility in the city. One full-time psychiatrist and two part-timers treat patients, said prison spokeswoman Renee Lapeyrolerie.

The Louisiana State University Medical Center has 29 acute care beds, and plans to increase that to 40, said Dr. Mark Townsend, vice chairman at the LSU Health Science Department of Psychiatry.

"We're having a very hard time finding nurses and clinical social workers to staff additional beds," Townsend said.

Although funds to help provide mental health facilities have been promised by the state, Townsend said he has not seen any sign of them so far.

The police have had a tough time dealing with the mentally ill since Charity Hospital suffered severe flood damage from Hurricane Katrina. The hospital had 300 beds for mental patients, a place they could be assessed, treated, monitored and kept safe, police say.

With that facility closed, police spend time taking people with serious mental problems to hospital emergency rooms.

"It's a bad situation for everyone," said Cecil Tebo, administrator of the police department's crisis unit. "There aren't beds for people and hospitals are discharging them before people are stable enough to live in the community."

Calls to deal with people who are homicidal, suicidal or gravely disabled are increasing by about 10 calls a month, Tebo said. And more calls are bringing in familiar faces. Officers say they are picking up people with serious mental problems time after time because there is no place for them to get treatment.

The problems are compounded when the person is homeless, said Maj. Michael Glasser, president of the Police Association of New Orleans.

"If you have someone with a mental problem and they don't have a place to stay they don't get help," Glasser said. "So we have to deal with them when we come across them."

The homeless population has doubled in New Orleans since Katrina, with about 12,000 people now believed to be homeless.

"To me, the problems with homelessness and mental health is something that keeps coming up," said Baty Landis, co-founder of the citizens group Silence is Violence. "We are really not dealing with either problem and it's only getting worse."

[alovel1]

I am in the process of becoming a New Orleans mental health professional. There is no doubt that our city is suffering. We have homeless mental health patients living on the streets because there are no programs to help them and no psych beds available. People don''t have money for help even if they want help, and they do not know how to find resources. Despite all this, there are a lot of people still dedicated to the recovery and to helping the people of this city. People ARE working to make things better. We are working for healing. WE DO WANT CHANGE. Even if mental health workers are not coming here from other places, we are creating professionals from the inside out. I have no doubt that we are living in modern day reniassance. Lassez les bon temps rouler.

[lily1984-2009]

Really? hard to believe. we should pay more attention to the issue here.i heard this news times from many friends playing on a tall dating site~~~~Tallmingle.com~~~,i did not believe, i think that they are know nothing but dating and love.
i am wrong.
what do you think???

[gmond]

so, they''re not coming to take me away, ha ha

[erasmus6]

Kids are growing up watching all the violence on t.v., movies, videos, computer games, and REAL LIFE in your country. The violence is increasing everyday. Before long you are going to have to declare your whole country in the state of emergency.

These children are the ones that are going to end up running the country one day. Wow, can you imagine that?

[erasmus6]

Yup, so what is the excuse for the rest of the country?:)

[mulevalley]

A Mental Health Crisis is nationwide. We ignore mental health like it doesn''t exist. It takes violence by someone with a problem to get it addressed, assuming they survive the incident. We did away with the vestiges of an archaic mental health system of warehouses under the Reagan Administration (to save money) but at least those people had shelter and food and care instead of living under bridges.

[rushman71]

walt1944: Since your not paying any attention to the issue here, this is about loonies in New Orleans, not about Bush!!! So take your Nazi minded arse and stick it in a gas chamber.

[rushman71]

walt1944: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz......sounds like another lib babbling over and over and...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[walt1944-2009]

The Great Emperor Bush II is not overly concerned about the problem of mental health in New Orleans due directly to the inadequate aid which the government has sent (or maybe not sent is a better word).

The Great Emperor feels, as his mother feels, that they are all "under privileged" people anyway, "beneath" the likes of the Great Emperor, his family, and all good, card-carrying neocon Fascist Nazis and thus, "un-deserving".

In fact, if he could do it "legally" the Great Emperor would round up all the mentally ill and send them to Iraq and Afghanistan to do an "Al Qeada" against the Al Qeada, thus "fighting fire with fire"!

At least Hitler had the doctors give the mentally ill lethal injections. The Great Emperor is just interested in blowing things (and people) up!

SIG HEIL, BUSH!!!