State psych hospitals latest Texas screw-up

If it’s in Texas, and it’s a state social service, you can pretty much count on it being underfunded, overworked and misoperated, with the stress of all three contributing to employee malfeasance. The Texas state mental hospital system is the latest poster child.

Sexual and physical assaults are not uncommon. In all, 72 employees of the system have been fired for physical abuse; dozens more on lesser charges, with no word on sexual assault firings.

“You get what you pay for,” said Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, who has bipolar disorder. “When you financially dumb something down, you make services cheap, something’s got to give. Unfortunately, it usually ends up being a mentally ill or disabled Texan.”

Of course, this is on a par with the state’s treatment of the mentally ill in general. Child Protective Services, understaffed in general, has little in the way of counseling services. And, mental health staff inside the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the state’s prison system? Forget it.

Beyond the active abuse, there’s the passive abuse of neglect.

Or, neglect combined with overmedication, which some parents believe has killed their mentally ill adult children.