"In Crisis"

INVESTIGATIVE CATEGORY

Houston Chronicle
02/25/2021

Too often, the mentally ill in America become dehumanized – a mere data point in a spreadsheet, news story or scientific study. As someone who struggles with mental illness, Houston Chronicle investigative reporter Alex Stuckey knows how damaging that can be.

So when Alex set out to look at Texas’ mental health system in 2019, her goal was to put a face on these issues.

It didn’t take long for her to find the story. Overlooked on a police call log from 2015 – in a small northeast Texas town that is home to a maximum-security psychiatric facility – was one call that stood out: “aggravated assault/murder.”

No one had written about it. Alex found the family, convinced them to talk, and spent hours learning about who the victim, Don Wallace, was and how he ended up in a state psychiatric hospital. Wallace had brushes with the law, and his erratic, paranoid behavior scared many of the people around him.

But Wallace was a father, son and engineer who had everything going for him until suffering a psychotic break at 35. He just needed help. And he couldn’t get it.

His death at the hands of a fellow patient revealed a system in crisis, where the mentally ill languish for years in jail; where deaths are rarely investigated by the federal government; where families receive no answers. That’s how our investigative series In Crisis started.

Days after the stories were published, Texas lawmakers filed multiple bills to fix the broken system and allocated $400 million to new psychiatric beds.

The bills sought to increase transparency about investigations done at hospitals across the state as well as to collect data on services provided to individuals with mental illnesses who had been accused of a crime. The state also started tracking which hospitals were receiving taxpayer-funded contracts to accept patients off the waitlist. The $400 million would revamp older hospitals and fund hundreds of additional beds in order to ease the vast waitlist for resources.

In Crisis would have been a heavy records lift during normal times. Alex needed police call logs for more than 60 hospitals in order to determine which hospitals were safe. She needed federal and state inspection records to see if and when certain hospitals were punished for poor patient care. She needed to quantify how serious the criminal justice system cycle was for the mentally ill, requiring her to go through 5,200 court cases that spanned decades.

But these were not normal times. Just a few months into the project, the world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The governor laid out an edict: Legal deadlines for public information requests were suspended. Agencies could take as long as they wanted.

And many of them took advantage. Often, Alex couldn’t even get a hold of records liaisons, let alone get them to acknowledge a records request. One agency took more than a year and a half to provide the records she had already paid hundreds of dollars for.

Tracking the mental health system across the state also meant dealing with tiny police departments and sheriff’s offices that didn’t understand the records law or how it applied to them. Many tried to use HIPAA inappropriately to stop the release of simple records such as police call slips, which required dozens of Attorney General opinions, adding to the time it took to receive the records.

This required her to build sourcing with prosecutors and mental health advocates, who could then provide to her the records she was being prevented from receiving.

Alex faced difficulties with the state in regards to the Dangerousness Review Board, a secretive board that determines what level of security a mentally ill person needs. The state stonewalled public records requests about the people who went before the board and what was used to determine their level of dangerousness – even though many of these individuals were in the hospital under a court order and had court cases pending – and even refused all interviews about the topic.

PDFs of Award-Winning Content

In Crisis February 28
In Crisis March 7
In Crisis March 13
In Crisis March 25
In Crisis May 9
In Crisis June 3
In Crisis September 19

For paying subscribers to the Houston Chronicle, click the links below:

Part I: 'Serious neglect'
Part II: Punishment, not treatment
Part III: 'Don’t take me back!'
Solutions: Fixing the crisis
Legislation: Bill seeks to fill gaps
Reform: Calls for transparency
Safety net: Not helping those in need
Funding: Lawmakers allocate nearly $400M
Sacred Oak: Why was this hospital closed?
'Help me': One man begs for help
Database: Which hospitals get state funds?
Timeline: An overwhelmed system

Submitted by Elizabeth Pudwill.