Monday morning, while the blame game for last weekend’s multiple shooting in Arizona shifted into overdrive, former Maine Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Daniel Wathen sat down for an informal chat with members of the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee.
Wathen had come to update veteran and rookie lawmakers alike on the ins and outs of the Augusta Mental Health Institute consent decree, which he has overseen as “special master” since 2003.
His primary message: When it comes to providing people who are mentally ill with the court-ordered services they need, Maine continues to fall short. Five million, six hundred thousand dollars short, to be exact.
As he made his way to the State House, Wathen couldn’t help but think about Jared Lee Loughner, the 22-year-old social outcast who’s now in federal custody, charged with killing federal Judge John Roll and five others, wounding U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others, and sending the entire country into a spasm of shock and finger-pointing.
“I didn’t want to play too much on this incident,” Wathen said later. “But I said (to the legislators), ‘You know, everybody’s focused on this and it’s clear that the man has mental health problems. If he had showed up three weeks ago looking for help at one of the providers’ offices, that’s not a time to be engaged in a discussion as to whether he can qualify for MaineCare.’ “
In other words, what happened at a Tucson shopping plaza Saturday should, at the very least, be a wake-up call to those who would balance state budgets by cutting mental health services.
Some say, with precious little hard evidence, that the increasingly nasty tone of today’s political discourse played a role in Loughner’s incomprehensible attack. Maybe it did and, then again, maybe it didn’t.
But as Loughner’s grossly inappropriate grin goes viral on home pages and front pages from Arizona to Maine, it’s abundantly clear that his shooting rampage was rooted deeply and dangerously in a mental illness that went untreated (if not unrecognized) for far too long.
We’ll leave it to the state of Arizona to determine what, if anything, could have been done to head off Loughner before he dropped out of college, bought a Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol and started writing “my assassination” and “Giffords” on envelopes that were found later in the home he shared with his parents.
And let us all remind ourselves that the vast majority of people who struggle with mental illness do so quietly, courageously and without any threat to the safety of those around them.
But let us also remember that serious mental illness ignored – Wathen recently reported to the Maine Superior Court that some Mainers covered by the consent decree have waited as long as 695 days simply to be assigned a caseworker – is a tragedy waiting to happen.
The 1990 AMHI consent decree, which grew out of a class-action lawsuit against the state by residents of the now-closed institution, now mandates comprehensive mental health services for 12,000 Mainers with “severe and persistent” mental illness. Eighty percent of those people receive treatment and other services through the state’s MaineCare program.
According to Wathen, the other 20 percent exceed MaineCare’s individual income limit of $903 per month.
Their choices: “Spend down” their often-meager incomes to become eligible for MaineCare coverage. Or wait months for increasingly scarce services they can’t afford anyway. Or, worst of all, give up seeking help.
Last month, Wathen asked Gov. Paul LePage and the Legislature for $5.6 million to fill that gap – an amount he maintains is “well within our means, even in tough times, to wrap this thing up.”
(Contacted Tuesday, incoming Administrative and Financial Services Commissioner H. Sawin Millett said the LePage administration “will give every consideration we possibly can to including part or all of the request” in the state’s next two-year budget.)
The alternative?
“If you don’t fund physical illness, people go home and die. They go away,” Wathen said. “But with mental illness, they don’t go away. They show up again in hospitals, jails, in the community, that sort of thing.”
Or, when all else fails, in headlines?
“Or in headlines,” he said.
Wathen is hardly alone in his well-placed concern.
Tuesday morning, as the talking heads on the left blamed the right for inciting violence with its red-hot rhetoric and the talking heads on the right blamed the left for playing politics with human tragedy, Westbrook Police Chief Bill Baker sat down and pounded out an e-mail to national, regional and local media types asking that they please stop “missing the point.”
While he agrees with Arizona’s Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik that the dialogue among politicians and pundits is “out of control” and a “disservice to the country,” Baker wrote, he disagrees with Dupnik that the political climate had anything to do with Loughner’s acts.
Asserted Baker, “One person caused this tragedy – the shooter!
“There are hundreds of thousands of mentally ill (and often drug-addicted) people living on the edge that are capable of this kind of act in most cities and towns of any size,” Baker wrote. “Police chiefs like me get rambling voice mails from them, letters from them with evidence of the chaos in their brains scribbled in every margin … often laced with menacing anti-government and anti-authority words.”
Mind you, the chief wasn’t just complaining. Nor, like so many others, was he simply closing his eyes (and ears) and pointing.
Rather, Baker was trying in his own small way to redirect the media spotlight away from the political blather and toward what he, much like Wathen, sees as a social imperative.
“We need a thoughtful analysis of our mental health and criminal justice systems to fill the gaps and fix them,” Baker wrote. “We need to remove the stigma associated with getting mental health services. … We need insurance reform and funding for services that these people need; and we need cities and towns across America to pull together and deal with these issues.”
Now there’s something worth talking about.
Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at: bnemitz@mainetoday.com
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