“Ga. settles mental-health case - AZCentral.com” |
| Ga. settles mental-health case - AZCentral.com Posted: 19 Oct 2010 11:35 PM PDT by Richard Fausset - Oct. 20, 2010 12:00 AM ATLANTA - In a settlement that will serve as a model for enforcing the rights of the disabled, the U.S. Justice Department reached an agreement with Georgia to move many patients with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities out of the psychiatric hospitals and into the community. The agreement, announced Tuesday, resolves a Justice Department lawsuit brought in January under the Americans with Disabilities Act. It also caps a federal investigation that was launched after more than 100 suspicious deaths of state mental-hospital patients were documented over a five-year period in a 2007 series in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The federal probe confirmed an "alarming frequency" of preventable deaths, suicides and assaults in the hospitals. As part of the agreement, Georgia will stop admitting all people with developmental disabilities, such as Down syndrome and autism, into its state hospitals by July 1. The state will move all developmentally disabled patients from state hospitals to "community settings" by July 1, 2015. The state must also expand community-based services for approximately 9,000 mentally ill patients. Georgia officials were pleased to avoid direct federal control of its mental-health services. Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said Tuesday that the settlement would serve as a "template" for nationwide enforcement of the principles laid out in a landmark Supreme Court disability-rights case from 1999, Olmstead v. L.C. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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