Mental Health Madness: California Refuses to Provide Psychiatric Care to Those Needing it Most

News provided by

Union of American Physicians and Dentists

Jun 03, 2022, 10:00 ET

SACRAMENTO, Calif., June 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- EVENT: On Monday, June 6, 2022 from 12 pm - 2 pm on the west side of the State Capitol in Sacramento, California (1305 10th Street), the Union of American Physicians and Dentists (UAPD) and other organizations will be holding an event to call attention to the plight of incarcerated and institutionalized mentally ill people, who lack access to basic psychiatric care.

In addition to public-sector psychiatrists, invited speakers include state legislators, advocacy agencies for inmates and the mentally ill, and affected family members. Participants will be marching near the capitol with picket signs.

THE ISSUE: In California there are nearly a hundred thousand prison inmates and 5,700 state mental hospital patients who need psychiatric care, and not nearly enough psychiatrists on hand to treat them. It's creating a hidden crisis inside these institutions, which spills over into California communities as inmates and patients are released.

Early this year, there was a 52% vacancy rate for civil service psychiatry positions in the California state hospitals and a 48% vacancy rate for those positions in state prisons. Five of the California State Prisons had no psychiatrists on staff at all.

As a result, many patients and inmates go without desperately needed care. There are instances of patient suicide and self-mutilation in these institutions that would have been prevented with timely access to psychiatrists. In one horrific case that was described in court documents, an inmate in a state of acute psychosis gouged out her own eye then ate it. The report by Dr. Michael Golding¹, who at the time was the chief psychiatrist for the prison system, stated that multiple subsequent psychiatrists who heard about this event agreed that medications had been needed, but there was no psychiatrist in the facility or on-call to write the prescription.

The State of California has been less than transparent about these problems. Year after year, the State has put a band-aid over the psychiatrist shortage by hiring temporary, privately contracted psychiatrists, paying up to $390 per hour, which is more than double what civil service psychiatrists are paid. These contract psychiatrists, several of whom make over $100,000 per month, cost California taxpayers about a hundred million dollars a year in total. The quality of psychiatric care suffers because of the on-again-off-again nature of these contract workers, as well as the long hours they are allowed to work. One contract psychiatrist working in a California prison made $130,000 in June 2021 by combining 480 hours of work with 170 hours of on-call time – that is equivalent to working more than 16 hours a day for all 30 days in June then being on-call an additional 5 hours per day.

The California Department of Corrections (CDCR) and the Department of State Hospitals (DSH) need to immediately step up their efforts to recruit and retain more onsite civil service psychiatrists. A coalition of organizations and the union that represents State psychiatrists has asked the legislature for a modest budget augmentation to hire enough civil service psychiatrists to meet the legally-mandated standard of care.

¹ REPORT of MICHAEL GOLDING, 10-31-2018

Contact: Sue Wilson, 510-926-0408, [email protected]

SOURCE Union of American Physicians and Dentists