Official suggests mental-health system changes

AUGUSTA – The overseer of the state’s mental-health system is recommending that the state’s psychiatric facilities no longer be run by the courts.

In a decision released Monday, court master Daniel Wathen said state officials are working hard to meet a 1990 court order seeking improvements at Augusta Mental Health Institute and within the mental-health system.

Wathen recommended that the state be required to complete a compliance plan by May 7, but did not set a deadline by which the plan had to be implemented.

Wathen’s recommendations must be approved by Maine Superior Court Chief Justice Nancy Mills.

“A great deal of work remains to be done,” Wathen wrote in his recommendation to Mills. “Nonetheless, I conclude that the departments are diligently pursuing compliance in good faith and have made sufficient progress to justify my recommendation to this court that the six-month stay of the order appointing a receiver for the community-based system be extended indefinitely.”

Mills last September ordered that a receiver be appointed to operate AMHI until conditions improved to the court’s satisfaction.

Mills at the time said that the state had failed to comply with the 1990 consent decree ordering improvements in the system, and that there was no evidence it would comply anytime soon.

The consent decree settled a 1989 class-action lawsuit by AMHI patients after the deaths of several patients from heat exposure and suicide. The decree called for improving services and reducing the number of patients while shifting more patient care to community settings.

Wathen said the state has improved connections between the community mental health system and AMHI.

He said 23 of 38 long-term patients from AMHI no longer require hospitalization and have been placed in community facilities, and that individualized treatment planning has improved. He said improved intake has started, supplemental housing funds have been requested, and that the state is working to increase recovery and peer-support programs.

Lawyers representing patients have 48 hours to appeal Wathen’s report. Helen Bailey, a lawyer with the Disability Rights Center, declined to say what her legal team would do. Bailey said they were studying Wathen’s recommendation and were not ready to comment yet.

Sabra Burdick, the acting state mental health commissioner, said she was gratified that Wathen recognized the efforts under way to comply with the consent decree, even if she could not promise to reach compliance by the June date Mills envisioned.

Burdick said she expects a plan to reach compliance to be in place by May 7, as Wathen wanted.