Mental health reform, in full.

It's not often that we simply pass along unedited press releases from the governor's office, but this is somewhat illuminating.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine on Wednesday held a bill signing ceremony to mark the passage of legislation related to the mass shooting at Virginia Tech. During the 2008 session, much attention focused on sweeping reforms to the mental health system, sponsored by Del. Phil Hamilton, R-Newport News, and Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfaix.

Gun bills also received a good deal of ink. It was a mixed pass/fail ratio.

But the full extent of the legislation is interesting to see. Individual bills relate to custody, court procedures and dealing with minors, and not all of them showed up in news stories.

We count about 32 bills - some of them duplicates - besides the budget bill. It's quite a list, and shows that the Tech shootings had a ripple effect far beyond the April 16th incident.

Follow this link to Kaine's press release.

By the way, a bit of bill-sigining trivia: Kaine signed only 10 bills during Wednesday's event, which is why they call it a "ceremonial" bill signing.

Comments

[TJ]

Hide Your Feelings In Public, Don't Laugh Too Loud and Watch What You Say and Write: Easy Peasy Involuntary Commitment Will Be Signed Into Law By Virginia's Governor This Wednesday
Posted on April 7, 2008 by hymes

This Wednesday Governor Kaine will sign laws that will make it even easier to involuntarily hospitalize and commit to forced drugging in their own homes Virginia citizens than it is already. (See previous posts on the 91% rate of hospitalization after commitment hearings in May of 2007, 84% in 1994 study).

These laws also force private mental health practitioners, psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed professional counselors and clinical social workers to turn over your health records even if they as your primary mental health provider do not think you are in need of forced treatment. Police will get to see some of your records, how much is unclear, supposedly it is limited to "what is necessary" to their role in commitment hearings and transporting folks but there will be no way to ensure they don't retain nor disclose your private health information since they are not health providers and are not subject to HIPPA. They could tell everyone in your town and you would have no real recourse.

Private psychiatrists finally woke up to the fact that their patients' rights and their rights were being usurped according to an article in an American Psychiatric Association publication, but a little too late since the law is being signed in 2 days. Maybe next time they will not rely on the rest of medicine, especially emergency room doctors, to make their patients' and their case in the General Assembly. I saw the emergency room doctors in action; they were not about protecting the interests of neither psychiatrists nor their patients, quite the opposite.

Governor Kaine insists on calling these new laws a "response to the Virginia Tech. tragedy" when they are no such thing unless you call scapegoating thousands of innocent Virginians with a disability rather than face the reality of that tragedy a "response". The fact is many folks were itching to get these laws passed for years and when that tragedy happened they were practically gleeful that they could use it to push their agenda despite the Governor's statement that he would not let the tragedy be exploited for political purposes.

Although the laws eroding the civil rights of all Virginians will be signed this Wednesday, they will not go into effect until July 1 of this year, so you have some time to practice never looking crazy in the street, never getting too loud, never making your landlord or wife or husband or roommate angry enough that they would use the new laws against you, never expressing too much feeling around others–too much will be defined in a completely unstandardized fashion by the thousands of folks now authorized to be "independent examiners" for involuntary commitment including nurse practitioners and nurse clinicians.

The truly depressing part of all this? No one outside of the mental health community seems to know or care about the loss of civil liberties that is about to happen, they do not even want to hear about it. History repeats itself in Virginia.

[TJ]

http://www.pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/37/7/30

New Federal mandate

[TJ]

and for the rest of the story:

http://hymes.wordpress.com/