Mental health is latest Texas agency to bear abuse criticism

Seventy-two workers have been fired in the past three years over allegations of abuse, while hundreds of others have been fired for other violations, including sleeping on the job and overmedicating patients, according to personnel records obtained by The Dallas Morning News.

The violence against patients included choke holds, headlocks and threats against patients at the state's 10 psychiatric hospitals, the newspaper reported.

There are about 18,000 patients and about 7,400 employees in the state psychiatric hospital system.

Officials with the Department of State Health Services, the agency that runs the psychiatric hospitals, said they take all allegations of mistreatment seriously. But they said that abuse and neglect are "absolutely not" pervasive and that verified cases are actually dropping.

Psychiatric hospitals are stressful environments, said agency spokesman Doug McBride. He acknowledged there are times when employees "do not handle a situation appropriately."

State officials say that the rules for reporting abuse and neglect are stringent and that confirmed cases of physical and sexual abuse are reported to police.

In the past year, Texas juvenile prisons, group homes for the disabled and state schools for people with mental disabilities came under fire for reports of widespread physical and sexual abuse. The Texas Youth Commission has undergone a complete restructuring.

Like other systems for vulnerable Texans, the state psychiatric hospitals are chronically starved for cash, advocates of more state funding say, and services at the local level can't keep up.

"You get what you pay for," said Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, who has bipolar disorder. "When you financially dumb something down, you make services cheap, something's got to give. Unfortunately, it usually ends up being a mentally ill or disabled Texan."