The Cost of Failing

In 2011, Pennsylvania made a promise. Everyone living in a psychiatric state hospital would come home.

The promise was a transformed mental health system, where getting care for depression, or bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia would be like getting care for bronchitis, or lupus, or cancer.

But tucked within that plan was a dire warning against a darker future for people with severe mental illnesses should the commonwealth fail: homelessness, unemployment, relapse, and incarceration.

It is this premonition, not the promise, that has become reality in Pennsylvania.

Thirty years of choices by seven governors, hundreds of legislators, and countless local officials have delivered us to this moment, where thousands of Pennsylvanians with serious mental health conditions face impossible choices instead of easily accessible care.

For over two years, reporter Danielle Ohl has followed this issue, and collected stories from families, health care providers, social workers, and others – far more than could fit in her published stories.

So now, Spotlight PA is empowering these people to tell you in their own words how the state’s failure directly affected their lives.

Join us July 30 at Scranton’s Albright Memorial Library for this live, storytelling event the past, present and future of Pennsylvania’s mental health care systems .