Eliminate The Wait Offers Strategy to Reduce Pressure on State Hospitals

KXAN of Austin recently reported that over the past 20 years the number of people in the Texas Criminal Justice System found incompetent to stand trial has increased by 38%. Each of these defendants is required to receive restoration treatment at Texas State Hospitals, but without funding for additional beds the waitlist for treatment has reached a staggering 1,883 (as of October 2021). For most of these individuals waiting for a State Hospital bed means an extended stay in a county jail where they often cannot receive the mental healthcare that they desperately need and experience further isolation from their communities. In some cases, like that of San Antonio resident Fernando Macias, they never make it out of jail at all.

Macias was diagnosed with manic depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In 2018 he experienced a mental health episode that resulted in a stand off with police. A judge declared him incompetent to stand trial and placed him on a State Hospital waiting list for restoration treatment. Due to the backlog in cases he never made it. Macias died in jail later that year due to complications from diabetes and kidney failure. There are many cases like his every year where people just like him never receive the treatment that they need, or get their day in court.

In an effort to prevent cases like Macias’ in the future stakeholders in the law enforcement and public health officials are coming together to improve improve cooperation, reduce pressure on the State Hospital System and offer a better path to recovery for people who get tied up in the criminal justice system. Their work has resulted in the Eliminate The Wait Plan, a guide for law enforcement entities to better serve people who find themselves in the court system because they are experiencing serious mental illness. The full plan can be viewed here.

As with many of the state-of-the-art researched based approaches to mental illness in our communities this plan focuses on keeping people out of jail whenever possible, and helping them to receive the treatment resources that they need. It also places a heavy focus on individual care and recovery over the need to punish offenders for crimes that they likely do not understand.

These efforts align very closely with our mission at Amber Lantern. As a part of the Texas HCBS-AMH program our goal is to keep people experiencing mental illness out of the streets, out of the courts and out of the hospitals. We believe that through our residential treatment based care we can help our clients achieve their individual recovery goals and ultimately reintegrate with their communities as independent and productive members of society.

Note on our sources:

This article draws heavily on the groundbreaking reporting of KXAN and the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. We encourage you to see the culmination of their extended mental health reporting project here.