Despite ongoing efforts to restore emergency services to a city devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, available resources for survivors dealing with serious mental illness remain at an all-time low. According to one recent report published in Psychiatric Annals, the number of inpatient psychiatric hospital beds has dropped from 487 pre-Katrina to 190. Since most of these remaining beds are reserved for psychiatric patients unable to live independently, only a fraction of those 190 beds are available for acute care.
The only state-operated mental health facility in New Orleans, the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital, is now scheduled for closing after Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal vetoed the 14 million dollars of funding needed to keep the hospital open. The hospital's closure on September 1 is expected to reduce the available number of beds to 133 leaving the city jail as New Orleans' largest psychiatric facility with 50 beds. Although state funding for mental health services has been rising, those funds have been earmarked for community-based services. Inpatient care services for the mentally ill continue to decline despite a rise in suicide rates and a sharp increase in the number of people with mental health problems, many who had been left homeless post-Katrina.
According to a World Health Organization study, the number of residents with serious mental health problems has risen from 6.1 percent pre-Katrina to 19.9 percent today due to the incidence of post-traumatic issues. The number with mild to moderate problems has risen from 9.7 to 19.9 percent. When the Federal Emergency Management Agency surveyed displaced families living in trailers and hotel rooms in February, 2006, it found that 44 percent of displaced persons suffered from some form of psychological distress. Since 2006, there have been 101 suicides and 726 suicide attempts in a population ranging from 200000 to 300000. In 2009 alone, there have been at least 24 suicides and 82 attempts.
Cecile Tebo, administrator of the New Orleans Police Department Crisis Unit that responds to 911 calls involving the mentally ill, has been outspoken in warning of the critical health care problems city has faced since Katrina. "I've told people for so long, just don't come back [to New Orleans] right now. Don't come back if you have any kind of special needs; this is not the place to be if you have elderly that are really sick, if you have children with special needs or people in the family with mental illness or mental retardation; this is just not a good place to be right now." Mrs. Tebo added that her own staff of volunteers is just a little more than half the size it was before Katrina.
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