An old crisis returns

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 | 2:06 a.m.

Southern Nevadans received a rude awakening in 2004 when Clark County declared a mental health crisis in response to hospital emergency rooms that were overflowing with mentally ill patients. The patients had nowhere else to go because there weren’t enough beds devoted to psychiatric care.

We commented at the time that a major culprit was the state’s refusal to properly fund mental health care over the previous several years.

Since then, three more emergency rooms have opened in the county and the number of psychiatric beds has more than doubled, according to the Southern Nevada Health District. But those were simply stopgap measures that failed to address the scope of the crisis.

As reported Monday by Timothy Pratt in the Las Vegas Sun, nearly one-third of the patients in Las Vegas Valley emergency rooms last week were awaiting psychiatric care. In fact, the 117 patients awaiting that care as of Thursday exceeded the number who were slotted for psychiatric treatment when the 2004 emergency was declared.

The surge in mental health patients can certainly be blamed in part on a lousy economy that has saddled the county with a record-high home foreclosure rate and double-digit unemployment. But because Nevada hadn’t adequately funded mental health care even when times were good, the state set itself up for potential disaster when times turned bad.

Those times have arrived, prompting the Southern Nevada Mental Health Coalition to review the situation for the first time since 2007.

As Janelle Kraft Pearce, chairwoman of the coalition, told Pratt: “There are more people in crisis, we still have overcrowding and a lack of services, bringing us kind of back to square one.”

On that score alone, Gov. Jim Gibbons and the Nevada Legislature failed the state’s mentally ill population miserably this year. Instead of expanding Nevada’s revenue base to make sure everyone pays his fair share of taxes, our elected officials once again settled on a weak compromise that will damage essential services.

Mental health care is at the top of that list.

Without immediate relief, all Southern Nevadans will find it more difficult to receive timely emergency treatment. That’s why the Legislature should not wait until its next regular session in 2011 to come up with the additional money necessary to address this mental health crisis.