Judge dismisses Nevada patient dumping civil lawsuit
By Phillip Reese and Cynthia Hubert, Sacramento Bee
A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a civil lawsuit brought on behalf of a patient who was bused to Sacramento from a Nevada state psychiatric hospital in Las Vegas.
Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital discharged James Flavy Coy Brown via Greyhound bus last February to Sacramento, where he had no connections and no arrangements for treatment or housing waiting for him. Brown’s story was the impetus for a series of investigative reports in the Sacramento Bee that found the hospital had shipped about 1,500 psychiatric patients to states across the nation in a five-year period.
In the wake of the Bee’s reports, Rawson-Neal lost its accreditation and its treatment protocols have been the focus of ongoing reviews by state and federal agencies. The hospital, Nevada’s primary facility for mentally ill people, remains in danger of losing its federal Medicare funding, pending demands for improvements.
Calling the busing of mental-health patients a violation of the 8th amendment seems an odd argument to make, but that doesn’t mean the busing program was appropriate. At least changes have been made — including the provision of chaperones when patients are bused to new locations.
Nevada should take care not to lose their primary mental health treatment center, lest they become another California. When then-governor Reagan closed the bulk of mental hospitals in CA, it resulted in huge numbers of patients becoming either homeless or incarcerated. That situation has yet to be remedied, and it’s a disgrace.
Mental illness is widely misunderstood, and patients suffer for this. We fear what we don’t understand, and we avoid what we fear. Society used to treat cancer patients the same way. Once cancer became something one could talk about freely, new treatments and cures came along in due course. Let’s do the same for mental illness. Talk about it. Even better: listen.