Posted on: Monday, November 25, 2002

N.Y. facility to pay for mental health patient to move here

Advertiser Staff and News Services

Mental health workers in Hawai'i are concerned that a mental health patient soon will be coming to Hawai'i to live at a homeless shelter.

A New York treatment facility plans to pay for the man's ticket to Hawai'i, and has asked United Self-Help to pick him up at the airport on Dec. 2 and take him to the Institute for Human Services.

United Self-Help executive director Bud Bowles said his agency will accommodate the request but said the agency is having trouble taking care of the people it already services.

The mental health treatment center in New York is operated by the Federation Employment Guidance Service, a large private nonprofit organization established by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York to provide health and human services, said Tracie Kam, a University of Hawai'i graduate student working as an assistant at United Self-Help.

A caseworker in New York told her the man — who lived in Hawai'i a few years ago but has no contacts here — is on medication and supposedly stable, she said.

Bruce Anderson, state health department director, said he was not directly familiar with the situation, but found the idea of mental health officials discharging a patient from one state to a homeless condition in another difficult to accept.

"I think it would be unconscionable for mental health officials in one state to burden another state that way, when every state is struggling to provide services to residents," he said. "We have paid for health services in other states, but we have never given someone a one-way ticket, hoping to relieve ourselves of the obligation. I can't believe anyone would be so callous."

Anderson said health department officials would contact the New York agency about the situation.

He said the health department provides treatment to about 4,000 of the 21,000 seriously mentally ill people here.