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sl8

(16,252 posts)
Tue May 28, 2024, 05:46 AM May 2024

This Mississippi Hospital Transfers Some Patients to Jail to Await Mental Health Treatment

https://www.propublica.org/article/baptist-desoto-hospital-civil-commitment-jail

This Mississippi Hospital Transfers Some Patients to Jail to Await Mental Health Treatment

Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto doesn’t have a psychiatric unit, so it sends patients elsewhere for mental health treatment. When publicly funded facilities are full, some patients go to jail to wait for help. One doctor said that’s “unthinkable.”

by Isabelle Taft, Mississippi Today
May 28, 6 a.m. EDT

Co-published with Mississippi Today

Series:Committed to Jail: How Mississippi Jails People for Mental Illness

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mississippi Today and co-published with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, the Sun Herald and MLK50. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.


When Sandy Jones’ 26-year-old daughter started writing on the walls of her home in Hernando, Mississippi, last year and talking angrily to the television, Sandy said, she knew two things: Her daughter Sydney needed help, and Sandy didn’t want her to be held in jail again to get it.

[...]

Roughly 200 people in DeSoto County were jailed annually during the civil commitment process, most without criminal charges, between 2021 and 2023. About a fifth of them were picked up at local hospitals, according to an estimate based on a review of Sheriff’s Department records by Mississippi Today and ProPublica. The overwhelming majority of those patients, according to our analysis, were at Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto, the largest in this prosperous, suburban county near Memphis.

“That would just be unthinkable here,” said Dr. Grayson Norquist, the chief of psychiatry at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, a professor at Emory University and the former chair of psychiatry at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi.

[...]

The practice appears to be unusual even in Mississippi, where lawmakers recently acted to limit when people can be jailed as they go through the civil commitment process. Sheriff’s departments in about a third of the state’s counties, including those that appear to jail such people most frequently, responded to questions from Mississippi Today and ProPublica about how they handle involuntary commitment. They said they seldom, if ever, take people who need mental health treatment from a hospital to jail. At most, said sheriffs in a few rural counties, they do it once or twice a month.

[...]

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This Mississippi Hospital Transfers Some Patients to Jail to Await Mental Health Treatment (Original Post) sl8 May 2024 OP
Great: Another branch to feed the pri$on pipeline live love laugh May 2024 #1
What is it with... 2naSalit May 2024 #2

2naSalit

(93,098 posts)
2. What is it with...
Tue May 28, 2024, 08:41 AM
May 2024

The "gulf states'' that makes them insist on being shitholes? I guess we need to reassess how we teach history and civics because those state governments are way off the rails.

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