BANGOR, Maine — A regional panel assembled by the City Council has started building a case for keeping Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center open.
The possibility that the facility might close and its patient load shift to Augusta prompted Bangor city councilors to form a 13-member regional group charged with the mission of keeping the services Dorothea Dix provides in the area. The group met for the first time Thursday afternoon at Bangor City Hall.
“The closure of Dorothea Dix in our view would be a public health threat, not only to the city of Bangor but also to the region,” Councilor Joe Baldacci said in opening the discussion. “We don’t have confidence at this point that there are other alternatives or resources that could really take care of people who don’t have insurance or who are indigent.”
Baldacci and fellow Councilor Nelson Durgin led the session with the help of Shawn Yardley, Bangor Health and Community Services director, who is an ex officio nonvoting member.
The tone of Thursday’s discussion suggested that there is little support for seeing state-run mental health services shift south to Augusta.
Penobscot County Sheriff Glenn Ross was among those who did not think that would work. While he noted that most inmates at Penobscot County Jail suffering from mental health conditions receive appropriate services through a contract with The Acadia Hospital, “there is a certain segment of the population that’s not appropriate for Acadia and therefore has to go somewhere — and that somewhere is Riverview.”
Dorothea Dix, which has 52 beds, is one of two state-run psychiatric hospitals in Maine and it serves a five- or six-county area. The other facility is Riverview Psychiatric Hospital in Augusta, the only forensic psychiatric facility in the state. It has 92 beds and is newer and more modern.
“Over the last six years I’ve had a crusade of trying to get jail inmates into [Riverview]. Tons of time, tons of effort, tons of frustration but very little success and so if the option of closing Dorothea Dix is, ‘Riverview is going to pick this up,’ then I’m very worried about that solution,” Ross said.
“Dorothea Dix, to its credit, has tried to step forward and fill the void of what others couldn’t. While they took a lot of criticism about the escape of inmate [ William Hall, a Bangor murder suspect who ran away last summer], that was an example of Dorothea Dix trying to help when Riverview would not accept that inmate,” he said.
“Ultimately, when this happened, they found space but that’s a symptom of a system that is breaking at the seams and I’m very concerned about what it’s going to mean to jails, law enforcement and our dollars because these costs don’t go away, they just get shifted.”
Dorothea Dix Superintendent Linda Abernethy said that while she couldn’t speak for Acadia, she noted that psychiatric hospitals are not compensated for providing inpatient services for Mainers who are between 19 and 64 years old, which is the bulk of the population Dix now serves.
The idea of Acadia Hospital picking up some of the patient load also has been raised.
The state’s lack of a strategy troubled Dennis Marble, executive director of the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter.
“Can’t we put the beat back on the leadership [of the effort to close Dorothea Dix]?” he asked.
“You really have to fully articulate exactly how you’re going to provide [a similar level of] services if you care about these people the way you say you do. I think we should simply demand a statement back [so that] not all the work falls here.”
Despite its vast service area, Dorothea Dix has faced the possibility of closure for several years, including last year. The hospital, however, got a reprieve last fall, when a draft report submitted by a statewide work group in charge of making recommendations about the hospital’s future said it should stay open, at least for now.
While Baldacci noted that Bangor, as host community, has taken the lead to keep Dix open, “we really need everybody’s help. We need to to do this as a regional effort.”
The group’s next meeting is set for Thursday, Feb. 9.
I don’t think sending crazy people to Augusta is the answer. We’ve been electing them every two years and it never seems to help.
It is better to shut this place down and move on to Augusta. Its been a bad year for them with escapes and all. If you want to run the place go do it, but i can tell eventually they will shut this one down
“Its been a bad year for them with escapes and all. ”
Sure, it’s hard to more with less.
How much has their funding already been cut ?
How much is it going to cost the tax payers to transport,
under guard, all those people that the Maine Superior Courts orders held for evaluation ?
Actions have consequences.
Connect the dots.
Does not matter, i can see the place closing by the end of 2013 if not sooner. Wanna make a bet on that just let me know
Besides a short sighted, unrealistic, illogical political agenda why should there not be major mental hospital where the regional medical center is located, again, exactly ?
“The possibility that the facility might close and its patient load shift to Augusta…”
Birds of feather …. ???
I am not sure I understand the difference between Dorothea Dix and the Acadia Hospital?
Acadia is more of an out patient place and rehab clinic. Yes it helps with a myriad of mental health issues but they have more of a revolving door policy. Also it’s also run rather bureaucratically and almost like a McD’s of hospitals. They talk of therapies such as CBT, DBT, and the like however the reality modern day hospitals like Acadia are “medication focused” and “laxidasical introspective” type therapies. Whereas the dying art of actual in depth time consuming therapies which are much more focused, time consuming, and work based are dying off. Dorathea Dix (once known as BMHI) was a long term inpatient / out patient facility that didn’t have this revolving door approach like modern medicine has. However there is a loss of interest by patients/clients, psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, etc. Now it’s hard to find someone even with a PHD other than someone via webcam to OK scripts while your 2.5 garden variety Social Workers are far more common than higher skilled PhD’s. No one seems to believe in actual Psychotherapy anymore (at least not in this area of the country) on both sides of the fence. Also our government doesn’t seem to believe in it as well. So basically it’s pills pills pills.. Sure they all still preach that pills are short term yet do nothing but prescribe prescribe prescribe. Places like Dorathea Dix is a dying breed. once grand structures involved in diving into the depth of the human mind now fallen to the way side for Fast Food type Establishments. This at a time when this country needs mental help the most. Places like Acadia are backed up with clients. I used to study Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology, but gave up. These are but hobbies of mine. For someone to pride themselves in any “real” work would upset the status quo. Why work 8 years for a concrete degree only to become a script writer or a simple shoulder to cry on (shackled by laws and rules that if you did give any real counseling you might get sued if it backfires)… when you can get a watered down 2.5 Social Work degree and collect a paycheck for basic baby sitting and ushering people through a system designed to make low skilled unpaid drone workers out of the less fortunate? Orson wells Time Machine missed out on that chapter of a not too distant future that we call “today”.
It’s sad to see the place shrink like that and now possibly close. This area of the country needs mental health more than ever. There would be tons of job growth in this field as well as a lot of people helped if only people cared more about funding such programs. Let alone believed in them. You’d think our taxes would go more towards our mental and physical well being than bail outs, greed, pay raises for those in congress, and the constant wars we start all over the world. Meanwhile we are decaying from within, mentally, spiritually, and physically. The slow decline of a place like Dorathea Dix is evidence of that. A once grand place that helped tons of people shrinking into non existence.