For nearly a year and a half, a woman has been languishing in Missouri's Greene County jail, waiting to be transferred to a state mental health facility. The woman was charged with a misdemeanor, found incompetent to stand trial and ordered by the court into state-run psychiatric treatment. She has been jailed for almost 450 days, waiting for a Missouri Department of Mental Health bed to open up. Had she been convicted of the misdemeanor, the maximum sentence would have been 1 year. The state's "main priority should be, how can we get people into beds quicker,” said Greene County Sheriff Arnott said, adding: “Quicker than a year and a half, which is absolutely an injustice. ... These are people who are mentally ill. That’s the only reason they’re in here.” There are 418 Missourians across the state on a waiting list for a mental health bed, up from around 300 at this time last year.
These are people who were arrested, found incompetent to stand trial and ordered into mental health treatment designed to allow them to have their day in court — a process called competency restoration that generally includes therapy and medication. The average time these individuals wait in jail before receiving treatment is 14 months, reports the Missouri Independent. Efforts to remedy the problem in the 2023 legislative session, including a pilot program and increasing outpatient competency restoration, have been slow to get off the ground. Only three people are currently enrolled in the jail-based treatment pilot program statewide, according to Debra Walker, a spokesperson for the Department of Mental Health. Only one person is in the outpatient treatment program. Walker said the agency is working on solutions but “none of them will impact the numbers quickly.” Last year, Department of Mental Health Director Valerie Huhn told the House budget committee the problem would get much worse before it gets better. “It’s probably going to be 1,000 individuals,” Huhn said, “long before we’re at 100 individuals.” Mary Fox, director of the Missouri State Public Defender system, said the wait times for mental health treatment are the worst she’s seen.
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