Horrible beyond belief.... A lot has changed in the year and a half since Mr. Theisen, 52 and homeless, threatened to kill himself with a butcher knife and ended up in a Las Vegas psychiatric center. After one night, Mr. Theisen found himself on a bus to San Francisco, several sack lunches and a day’s worth of medication clutched in his lap. “Technically, they shouldn’t have been allowed to send me anywhere,” Mr. Theisen said. “They should have put me in a little room until I got better.” Now, Mr. Theisen is at the center of a class-action lawsuit brought this month by San Francisco’s city attorney, Dennis Herrera, against the State of Nevada on behalf of 24 mentally ill and homeless people. They were all, like Mr. Theisen, bused out of Nevada and left on the streets of San Francisco with little or no medication. But that is just a small sampling, Mr. Herrera says, of the estimated 1,500 people who were bused all over the country in recent years from the state-operated Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Center in Las Vegas and other Nevada institutions, 500 of them to California. “It’s horrifying,” Mr. Herrera said. “I think we can all agree that our most vulnerable and at-risk people don’t deserve this sort of treatment: no meds, no medical care, a destination where they have no contacts and know no one.” But what makes it “even more tragic,” Mr. Herrera said, “is that on top of the inhumane treatment, the State of Nevada was trying to have another jurisdiction shoulder the financial responsibility for caring for these people.” Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, who has several weeks to respond to Mr. Herrera’s lawsuit, has declined to comment in the meantime.
Posted on: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 00:51:08 +0000
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