Group hears how mentally 
ill get along in nursing homes

CHICAGO (AP) – Mentally ill residents of Illinois nursing homes often don’t know their rights and some are confined against their will, a lawyer with 35 years’ experience in mental health law told a state task force Thursday.

Nursing homes in Illinois increasingly have housed younger adults with serious mental illnesses because hospital beds for psychiatric patients have dwindled without new funding for other housing options.

A pattern of assaults, rapes and murders by mentally ill residents in nursing homes prompted the formation of the task force. It will make recommendations to Gov. Pat Quinn by the end of January.

Chicago attorney Mark Epstein told the task force that case law suggests the state’s mental health law applies to nursing homes, but that law is seldom enforced, leaving the mentally ill without protections they would have in a psychiatric facility.

People with mental illness have the right to a hearing to determine whether they can leave a facility, even if their guardian wants them to be there, Epstein said.

Many nursing home operators fear legal liability if they let residents with mental illness leave easily, said Pat Comstock of the Health Care Council of Illinois, the state’s largest nursing home trade group. She said the law needed to be clearer.

Social worker Alice Virgil wrote a letter to the task force about her experience training nursing home workers for a University of Chicago program. She met nursing home staff who made minimum wage and had little or no training in mental illness.

Nursing home staff made her realize the profit motive worked against rehabilitating people with mental illness.