Mental Illness, Commitment, & Idaho Law

Mental Illness, Commitment, & Idaho Law

Rep. Carlos Bilbao, who represents district 11 (Gem and Canyon Counties) in the lower house of the Idaho legislature, was the speaker at Cloverdale Church of God's men's prayer breakfast this morning. To my surprise, he spoke about what both government and private organizations can do about mental illness. He is on the Health & Welfare Committee. Over breakfast, we had a chance to talk about the particular problems and what he and other members of the legislature are doing to fix it.

He agreed with me that Idaho's current mental illness commitment law isn't the major obstacle, and he agreed that deinstitutionalization was for many patients, a major mistake. What he described was an unfortunate but unsurprising consequence of Idaho's low density. He described one case where Emmett police had taken into custody a person who was mentally ill, and believed to be a danger to himself or others. The problem was: where do they put him?

He has to be held until a court hearing determine whether he should held on a temporary basis for treatment. But he can't be held in the jail. Local hospitals can't hold him without a certified psychiatric ward. The nearest available bed (public or private) was in Twin Falls--which is about three and a half hours away by ambulance. This was a Saturday night. For a relatively poor county like Gem (where Emmett is located), this means sending him by ambulance to Twin Falls on Saturday, then bringing him back on Monday for a hearing. And if (as was likely), the court ordered him to be held for treatment--another drive back to Twin Falls. At one time, some counties were reduced to handcuffing mental patients to a desk in the police station.

You don't have to have too many cases like this to destroy the mental health budget for Gem County--and there are a lot of other rural counties that aren't even as well off as Gem. So Bilbao and other members of the House are working on getting more general hospitals around the state to have at least a couple of beds that meet the certification requirement for a locked psychiatric ward, as well as expanding the number of psychiatric beds available around the state. This makes it possible to at least reduce the length of drive required to hold a mentally ill person who has been taken into custody.

This isn't the only problem associated with mental illness in Idaho, but it is at least a major problem.

UPDATE: One additional thought that came me while I was working on the telescope. Rep. Bilbao indicated that part of our problem was mentally ill Oregonians moving into Idaho because Oregon has pretty much given on its mentally ill. I rather doubt that it is this organized; probably more on the order of, "Oregon doesn't do much for its most severely mentally ill, and by a form of Brownian motion, some end up in Idaho."