Monday, June 11, 2007

A City in Crisis - Mental Health in New Orleans

(cross-posted at Daily Kos)

It is another blistering hot day here in Louisiana. An afternoon shower has fallen, and the steam is rising off the pavement from the rain. Even with the thermostat set to 78 degrees, the air conditioning is still running constantly. After spending my whole life in Louisiana, it is not the heat that brings about the wariness of the summer months. It is the fact that the warmer weather brings about the inevitable start of hurricane season.

Here in Louisiana, we have every reason to be vigilant with the start of a new season. Yet, it is difficult to concentrate on the dangers of the new season, since many of the problems that resulted from Hurricane Katrina have yet to be resolved.


Hurricane Katrina is still killing. Dr. Kevin Stephens Sr., director of the New Orleans Health Department, is publishing a study this month in the Journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. The study reportedly concluded that more local people are dying than before the storm. Another man, Orleans Parish coroner Dr. Frank Minyard believes that one day, the local medical community will be proven correct when they say that the aftermath of the storm has led to an increased number of deaths in the storm. He states that "Years from now, when they talk about post-traumatic stress, New Orleans after Katrina will be the poster child."

The mental health situation in New Orleans remains atrocious. For a city that has had to start over from scratch, the mental health situation has had to take a back seat to rebuilding the city’s economy and infrastructure. And, as I’m sure many of you know, mental illness is rising, with more people suffering from anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress.

In a city that already had a horribly inadequate mental healthcare system, it didn’t seem that it could get much worse, but then Hurricane Katrina hit. Our two major hospital centers, Tulane and LSU, lost their inpatient psych units in the storm. LSU ran the state mental health facility which had more than 100 beds before the storm, but it was so severely damaged in the storm that it has not reopened. The emergency room at Tulane has only one psychiatrist on duty. This is a major problem since patients are constantly coming in who are in the midst of severe mental illness issues. They are simply overwhelmed and don’t have the necessary staff or equipment to deal with them, and the psychiatric inpatients are being sent over a 100 miles away to Baton Rouge.

The city doesn’t have enough people trained to deal with mental health and there are not nearly enough buildings available to house psychiatric patients.

The state has received money from the state and country to deal with this, including $55 million from the Department of Health and Human Services to attempt to induce healthcare workers back to Louisiana. FEMA (Fix Everything My Ass) even gave $50 million for crisis counseling and outreach.

This is all well and good, except it is too little for a city in a full blown crisis.

More temporary facilities need to be built to house psychiatric patients and more mental healthcare workers need to come back to the city. The rebuilding process needs to speed up, and to do that, some state laws/regulations need to be looked at or amended.

In order to properly rebuild New Orleans, the mental health of its citizens should not be allowed to suffer.

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