(Aug. 16, 2017) The Treatment Advocacy Center began the #ABedInstead campaign last year as a way to raise general awareness about the lack of psychiatric beds across the country. Bed shortages are a barrier to treatment for those with serious mental illness who need care in an inpatient or residential setting. That is why restoring sufficient beds to meet need is one of our strategies for fixing the broken mental health system.
Deinstitutionalization was envisioned as the mechanism for replacing large hospital facilities with small community-based care close to home for psychiatric patients. More than 95% of the nation’s state psychiatric hospital beds were closed as a result. But the ideal of universal, appropriate community-based mental health care was never fulfilled and, as overall bed numbers continue to shrink, the gap between bed supply and demand grows every single year.
Restoring psychiatric hospital beds has long been a focus of the Treatment Advocacy Center, as Going, Going, Gone: Trends and Consequences of Eliminating State Psychiatric Beds, published in 2016, is the fourth census of state hospital beds we have published in the past decade. We followed in 2017 with Emptying the “New Asylums”: A Beds Capacity Model to Reduce Mental Illness Behind Bars, which used computer modeling to show how small changes in common practices could reduce bed waits for jail inmates with mental illness.
Without access to psychiatric hospital beds, individuals in need of intensive services and their families and caregivers struggle, emergency rooms become crowded with patients in psychiatric crisis for whom no beds are available, and law enforcement is diverted to mental health calls because people have nobody else to call.
You can still join the campaign to support more access to inpatient beds and keep up-to-date on all the Treatment Advocacy Center is doing to restore beds for people who need treatment that cannot be provided in the community.