I watch the numerous TV ads extolling the improvements and virtues of Lawrence Memorial Hospital and its claim of serving all of our citizens. Sometimes I get mad, but most of the time I just feel sad, like tears are washing over my very soul.

I, too, am a Lawrence citizen. I just happen to be one of those that has no room at the inn because I have a serious and persistent mental illness.

Officials talk of the “safe rooms” in the ER where patients can be “treated” or monitored until they can be transferred to mental health units in Kansas City or Topeka. Believe me, the LMH ER staff are wonderful to me when I have been there. But, I receive no “psychiatric treatment;” it is merely a holding pen until an out-of-city, out-of-mind transfer can be made.

Let me tell you of my last experience so you can see how the provision of “services to all our patients,” and the provision “with a pathway to get the mental health care that they (the mentally ill) need” as stated by Dana Hale, LMH vice president of nursing, in a Dec. 20 Journal-World article really works – or doesn’t.

My therapist sent me to LMH ER because she felt I needed temporary hospitalization for medication readjustment because I was suicidal. The fine staff from Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center evaluated me and concurred with the recommendation, so they began their search to find a place for me. By the way, one of my conditions is agoraphobia and I can have terrible panic attacks if I try to leave Lawrence without family support. The Dec. 20 Journal-World article talked about transfers to Topeka or Kansas City. There is one hospital in Kansas City where I have been a number of times and where I know the staff, they know me and I feel safe – three crucial components for a successful in-patient stay.

So, Bert Nash began their phone calls. Not only did my familiar Kansas City hospital not have a single bed available, there was not a single psychiatric unit in Kansas City or Topeka with an available bed. Now what? There was talk of sending me to Osawatomie State Hospital although they are overcrowded and understaffed and not a place I needed to be. If this had been their decision that night, I would have been handcuffed and shackled like a criminal and taken to Osawatomie by the sheriff’s department.

Through the diligence of the Bert Nash staff, they finally found a bed space for me in a small Leavenworth unit. No handcuffs now! I was put in the back of a caged van and taken to Leavenworth by a contracted transportation service. In spite of my agoraphobia, I left the confines of my community, transported in a caged van to a facility where I knew no one on the staff or in the community.

And mine was a “good” experience as opposed to many Lawrence mentally ill individuals without insurance or family support. Those citizens who sometimes hallucinate and become disoriented are arrested for disorderly conduct or some other related charge and they wind up in this nation’s “new mental health system.” In a Journal-World article earlier this year, Undersheriff Ken Massey estimated that one-third of inmates at the Douglas County Jail have some form of mental illness.

This “jailing” of the mentally ill rather than providing humane hospital treatment has become a national explosion. Today, the nation’s largest mental health facility is the Los Angeles County Jail where multiple wings of the jail are set aside just for the mentally ill and where psychiatric nurses dispense powerful psychiatric drugs. Just for your information, the second and third largest mental health “facilities” in the U.S. are Dade County Jail in Miami and Rikers Island in New York City.

Yes, we are no Los Angeles, Miami or New York City, but we are following the same path. Treat us? Yes, maybe, but somewhere else, away from familiar therapists and without the support of family and friends. If no beds are available elsewhere or if we don’t have insurance, hide us away in an overcrowded state hospital. Or, worse yet, if we were temporarily psychotic and committed a misdemeanor crime, then send us off to the overcrowded county jail where we can sit and further decompose for three to six months until we can be taken to be evaluated at Larned State Hospital, well out in western Kansas, away from many friendly eyes, to a facility that just this year was found by state officials to be providing “inhumane conditions” and that was downgraded from full to conditional certification from a national agency.

To my fellow Lawrencians, I would like to think that we are a caring community, far removed from Los Angeles, Miami and New York City, but evidence here and across the state shows that we have started down that slippery slope and it seems to be gaining momentum.

Maybe in Los Angeles, but not here, not in Lawrence, Kansas. As Jesus said, “Even as you treat the least of these, you treat me.” Please, this holiday season, demand that Lawrence will stand like a “beacon on a hill,” that we will insist that LMH will provide a safe, treatment-oriented mental health unit to meet the needs of our locally mentally ill. And, so that the LMH ads will really ring true.

– Bill Simons, a Lawrence resident, was director of Project Acceptance, a consumer advocacy organization, from 1988 to 1993. For his advocacy activities on behalf of the mentally ill, he received the Bert Nash Center’s Pioneer Award in 1992, and the Independence Inc. Community Access Award in 1997.