http://wvgazette.com/News/200808181545
A non-profit psychiatric hospital in West Virginia is adding 22 beds in its rebuilding so it can accept more people diverted from the state’s over-crowded state hospitals. It is not going to accept forensic patients who have been found not guilty by reason of insanity or are otherwise in a psychiatric bed after being arrested for a crime. This may not seem like much to get happy about, but the fact is that mixing forensic and voluntary and civilly committed psychiatric patients has always been a source of danger for patients who have committed no crime and are at their most vulnerable in the total institution that all psychiatric hospitals are. The mixing of forensic and non-forensic patients may also have a deleterious effect on staff attitudes towards patients of the hospital in general as we are a society that still uses distancing and othering as our only known ways to deal with criminal behavior. If at some future date we become a society that values and implements restorative justice and other paradigms that work to make shunning and distancing no longer necessary cultural responses than this will all be moot, but we are very far from there yet.
