There’s a proposal to build a 16-bed mental health care facility in Essex County. A non-profit agency serving the Northeast Kingdom wants to partner with the state to add more psychiatric beds.
Supporters say such services are sorely needed, but not everyone agrees on where and how they should be provided.
Ever since tropical storm Irene destroyed Vermont’s only public psychiatric hospital in Waterbury, there has been a shortage of beds for people struggling with acute mental illness. Even with a new hospital in Berlin, not every patient who needs residential treatment is getting it. That’s why DW Bouchard, Executive Director of Northeast Kingdom Human Services, wants to build and operate a 16-bed residential facility in Essex County — possibly on about 700 acres now privately owned on a ridge overlooking the village of Bloomfield.
“This secure residential [space] is going to be created somewhere in the state. We think we can do it. We think we can run it well. We think we can run it in Essex County where we can meet the needs of our community, help to meet the needs of the state and create an economic engine within Essex County that can provide jobs and income coming in and tax base and all of that,” Bouchard said.
Bouchard says it costs about $1 million per bed per year for the state to operate the new Berlin Hospital. But he believes the Essex County unit could serve similar patients at half that cost, and relieve what he calls a “service bottleneck.” The new Northeast Kingdom facility, he says, would free up beds at the hospital in Berlin, which might then accommodate mental health patients now being held in community hospitals at a daily cost to the state of about $2,000.
But not everyone crunches the numbers that way, or believes Essex County is the best place for a new residential treatment center. Vince Illuzzi, for example, thinks it’s a “mistake” to put it there.
Illuzzi is States Attorney for Essex County who has also served in the state senate. He says mental health patients who need supervision are already being well served in the Northeast Kingdom by hundreds of residents who share their homes in return for a fee similar to that paid to foster parents. Illuzzi says that’s better than housing mental health patients all together in a remote corner of the state where emergency and law enforcement services are scarce.
“I think what will happen is these people will be institutionalized — out of sight out of mind. There’s not a lot of opposition in Bloomfield because Essex County is the most rural county in Vermont. So perhaps the thinking is, ‘We’ll propose it here, if three people show up it's not going to be viewed as a groundswell of opposition,’” Illuzzi said.
But in fact over 75 people showed up at a recent informational meeting, where DW Bouchard, of Northeast Kingdom Human Services, says he was able to allay some of the concerns Illuzzi raises.
Eric Quintin, a psychologist at NKHS who specializes in schizophrenia and other serious disorders, says he can think of many clients who badly need this kind of residential support, and are not getting it now.
He calls one patient, to protect his privacy, “Mr. X.”
“Mr. X has schizophrenia, the paranoid type, a lot of behavioral difficulties and assaultiveness, but also has a medical condition that is preventing us from giving him necessarily all the psychiatric medication that would make him more stable,” Quintin explained.
Which is why Mr. X is a challenging case, and not the ideal candidate for a home setting. But Quintin said patients like him might be able to learn to better manage their mental illnesses at the facility being proposed for Essex County. And, he adds, without a secure residential setting, Mr. X might be living in the area anyway, without supervision, at risk of harm to himself and others.
The Northeast Kingdom Human Services proposal will have to jump through a lot of hoops, though, because the state has not even decided yet whether to support another residential facility, much less where to put it.
