The Taskforce on Commitment of the Supreme Court Commission on Mental Health Law Reform agreed on several added protections that exist in other states for folks who are involuntarily committed to mitigate damage to their living situation and their financial status caused by sudden involuntary detention away from home. We agreed that people under involuntary inpatient commitment should be protected from eviction during their 30 day initial stay in a hospital solely due to inability to pay rent due to being away from home and also protection from eviction from nursing homes and adult care facilities since some of these facilities use commitment as a way to get rid of expensive or bothersome residents who then end up in the hospital for long periods without needing to be there because they have no place to which to return on discharge.
We agreed that folks involuntarily detained under mental health laws should be exempt from financial judgments against them in their absence. We agreed that people should not be forced into bankruptcy to pay for involuntary treatment they did not want in the first place.
Were any of these protections even asked to be sponsored by a legislator by the Chair of the Commission? I do not know but certainly none were sponsored let alone enacted.
We all agreed that a huge problem in this state was lack of training of special justices who run commitment hearings and are not real judges, just lawyers, some right out of law school, who watch a 10-year-old video to qualify as a special justice. However, the Virginia General Assembly refused to spend the money to train special justices even though it was a small amount compared to the rest of the mental health budget. Rumor has it that Rob Bell killed the special justice training, but I do not know this for a fact.
Are magistrates who issue temporary detention orders going to be better trained or qualified under the new legislation? No.
Are we going to have better qualified and better paid lawyers defending people held for commitment? No. They will still be paid only $75 per case.
Are we going to have better paid and better qualified independent evaluators in the commitment process? No, quite the opposite, the General Assembly decided to let nurse clinicians and nurse practitioners perform evaluations despite the lack of training in that area in their discipline. Moreover, the pathetic fee paid for independent evaluations was not raised one bit.
Are we going to have better paid special justices to attract better-qualified lawyers? No. No raise in the ridiculously low fee they are paid per hearing that encourages practices in Northern Virginia such as holding all hearings at 7 a.m. in the morning even when that means getting a patient up at 4 a.m. to get to another hospital or court for their hearing so the lawyers can earn money in their regular day jobs.
Did we get better side effect monitoring? No, we did not, despite the fact that many states, but not Virginia, are currently suing drug companies over the fact that they were not warned of the dangerous and deadly side effects of several of the psychotropics that will be forced on more people under the new laws. Of course, it is fair to be forced to take drugs that cause diabetes in order to make the state happy, right? No need to make sure actual physicians are monitoring the bloodwork of those under forced drugging orders to prevent diabetes, tardive dyskinesia, heart problems, liver problems, polycystic ovary syndrome in young women, kidney disease, or neuroleptic malignant syndrome, which actually kills those who get it.
Gee, I feel so much safer as a citizen of Virginia, don’t you?
April 8, 2008 at 9:13 am
Oh, if you could get a copy of that 10 minute training tape.