Opinion: Alaska’s mental health care hospitals must produce a report card

Updated: 3 Hours ago Published: 3 Hours ago

In 2025, the Alaska Legislature will allocate tens of millions of dollars to care for people with severe mental illness. Without at least an annual report card outlining patient satisfaction and recovery rates, the Legislature and the public would have no way of knowing whether mental health programs in closed facilities are helping or harming patients.

On December 19, with the help of superstar Paris Hilton, the Stop Institutionalized Child Abuse Act passed. With overwhelming bipartisan support in the US House of Representatives After unanimous approval by the Senate. President Joe Biden has now signed the bill into law.

Hilton testified that when she was a teenager, she was confined to four different psychiatric facilities due to what she described as behavioral issues. Here are some of the complaints she made to Congress: She was required to undress and shower in front of male staff, was isolated from her family, was unable to have private conversations on the phone and any violation of hospital rules. It can lead to what could be described as “corporal punishment.” She described psychiatric facilities that relied heavily on medications rather than talk therapy.

The same abusive conditions in psychiatric facilities that Congress found appalling occur in Alaska and for the same reasons: inadequate government oversight and, for the most part, psychiatric facilities allowed to operate secret from the public and the Legislature.

For Alaska to have a successful system of mental health care for people with severe mental illness, we need to know how many people rotate in and out of closed psychiatric facilities each year for involuntary evaluation or treatment. We also need to know the number and type of psychiatric patients’ complaints, injuries and traumatic events during treatment or transfer. Only through legislation can there be a requirement for the state to retain and share these statistics.

Statistics like these are often the only voice patients have in closed psychiatric facilities. For example: If there were 50 patient-on-patient assaults in a facility, that would tell the state that violent patients should be separated from non-violent patients. If police were called to psychiatric facilities more than 100 times a year to subdue violent patients, these statistics would tell the state that forensic units need to be larger and adequately staffed. Even now, state agencies downplay the importance of statistics in helping shape a good mental health care system.

In 2023, House Bill 172 increased access to behavioral health crisis services in less restrictive settings by adding a moderate and sub-acute level of care, allowing individuals experiencing behavioral health crises to transition from institutional settings. But without the state making statistics available to the public, there is no way to make improvements in patient care and rights.

Every state has a disability law center that provides assistance to people with disabilities. Many states also have a statewide office of advocacy or an independent office contracted by the state to protect people with disabilities. One good point of these offices is that they are not only required to protect people with disabilities, but they are also required to promote patients’ rights. The Alaska Legislature should establish an office of defense.

Paris Hilton was right. Psychiatric institutions should be asked to be more prepared regarding statistics. The rights of mentally ill patients require a government enforcement mechanism. It’s up to the Alaska Legislature to make that happen.

Faith J. Myers is the author of Madness in Alaska: A History of Alaska’s Treatment of the Mentally Ill, and he spent more than seven months as a patient in closed psychiatric facilities in Alaska.

The opinions expressed here are the author’s own and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a wide range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email Comment (at)adn.com. Send posts of less than 200 words to letters@adn.com or Click here to apply via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for messages and comments here.