Psych treatment beds scarce in the area

Disclaimer: This article references suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, you can reach the 988 Lifeline at any time of day or night by dialing or texting 988. It's also possible to chat with someone online at 988lifeline.org. FINDLAY — People with mental health conditions have long been pushed to the fringes of society and increasingly into the criminal justice system, forcing places like jails into a role they were never designed to take on. Local officials say the trend is driven by a collapse in psychiatric infrastructure, a shortage of treatment beds and a lack of community-based services. Scholars argue that it reflects a deeper problem: a national pattern in which confinement replaces care. Capt. Jesse Sterrett, Hancock County jail administrator, agrees with the argument that jails are becoming de facto mental institutions. He reports his jail staff interacts with inmates with mental health issues "24/7." "I would say between 50% and 75% of our clientele (inmates) are being treated and or seen for mental health issues," Sterrett said. The Hancock County Sheriff's Office 2025 annual report states that inmates received mental health care 975 times last year while incarcerated. It also states HCSO spent 42% of its 2025 budget on corrections, or approximately $5.1 million. Some inmates experience "low-acuity" conditions like anxiety or depression. Others arrive with "high-acuity" conditions in which there may be a greater disconnection from reality. "People who don't know where they are, don't know why they're here, hearing voices, speaking to people who aren't there," Sterrett said. "High levels of psychosis and dissociative identities." Some individuals were originally pink-slipped to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation, but after becoming agitated or assaulting medical staff, were criminally charged and brought to jail. Others end up incarcerated simply because there is nowhere else to put them. Data provided by Brookelyn Ernst, clinical provider with the Family Resource Center and for the inmates of the Hancock County Jail, indicate the most common diagnoses in the inmate population in 2025 include schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, alcohol use disorder, opioid use disorder and stimulant use disorder. Sterrett said some "high-acuity" individuals are eventually transferred to state psychiatric institutions, but many wait months for a bed. "We're holding inmates in a limbo state until they can move on to their treatment facilities," he said. Mircea Handru, executive director of the Mental Health and Recovery Services Board of Seneca, Ottawa, Sandusky and Wyandot Counties, said that the bottleneck begins with the state. Ohio only has six state psychiatric hospitals. The one serving Northwest Ohio, Northwest Ohio Behavioral Hospital in Lucas County, has 113 beds for 23 counties. "Thirty to forty years ago, the same hospital had 3,000 beds," Handru said. "Now it's 113. Ninety-nine percent of the time, if you call them at nine o'clock every morning, they won't have beds available." He wants to see not only increased funding, but policy changes. "Jails were designed to house individuals, not to be hospitals," he said. "Lawmakers should closely examine increasing the number of state hospital beds in the state of Ohio." He also believes keeping people out of jail because of mental health issues starts with prevention, early intervention and adequate treatment resources. Many of the existing beds are occupied by people serving forensic commitments, some for decades. "We have people there that have been there for 20 years," Handru said. "That bed is never moving." With no available psychiatric beds, people with psychiatric disorders end up in county jails, even when it's a terrible environment for them. Jeremy Cherson of the Bail Project, an organization that aims to make the criminal justice system more equitable, said that carceral settings are among the most dangerous places to put someone experiencing mental health or substance use disorders. "Many of our clients are presenting with mental health issues or struggles with substance use dependence and addiction," Cherson said. "They go into jail and it doesn't help any of those things." Even short stays can be harmful. Being incarcerated for as little as 48 hours increases the likelihood of recidivism exponentially and experiencing substance withdrawal in jail can be life-threatening. "We have client stories of people withdrawing from drugs in the middle of a freezing jail cell, without blankets, without anything except an aspirin," he said. Nationally, the largest "psychiatric institutions" in the U.S. are not hospitals — they are Rikers Island in New York, Cook County Jail in Chicago and the Los Angeles County Jail. "That just speaks to how badly we have addressed issues of mental healthcare," Cherson said. "Treating mental illness as a crime inevitably leads to incarceration." He said that every dollar that is spent on incarceration is money not spent on healthcare and prevention. In 2022, Seneca, Sandusky and Ottawa counties funded a feasibility study for a regional behavioral health treatment center designed to stabilize people in custody with serious mental health needs and would have mitigated the need for state beds. The goal was to create a specialized unit for people local jails struggle to house safely. The project was estimated to cost $60 million to build, plus $4 million-$12 million annually to operate. Seneca County Commissioner Tony Paradiso said he "needed to get the oxygen mask out" when he saw those numbers. Handru agreed. "I told them I'd have to fire all my employees, close all the services, and maybe we could make it work," he said. It simply wasn't feasible, so Seneca County backed out and the project died, leaving the region with the same issue it started with — the jail is the only institution that cannot say no. But what other alternative is there? Sterrett said, correctional staff face daily challenges caring for the "high-acuity" inmates and some staff would rather not interact with them at all. "If you can imagine every time you go in to serve them breakfast, they spit in your face and throw feces and urine at you," he said. "There's definitely a challenge." In the Hancock County Jail, an inmate on suicide watch must be observed every 10 minutes. If they are actively engaged in attempting suicide, they must remain under constant supervision. "Some (inmates) are on high levels of suicide watch and still find ways to harm themselves," Sterrett said. "We don't have appropriate space for them in our current facility. That's our biggest challenge." Before COVID, Hancock County's 98-bed jail housed up to 128 inmates per day, forcing staff to use rec rooms, cots and any available floor space to accommodate them. "Overcrowding exacerbates mental health issues," Sterrett said. What's worse, Sterrett said, is that inmates who have been sentenced to serving time at the state facility are stuck in the county jail simply because there aren't beds available. "A lot of these individuals need a higher level of care than an incarceration facility has the ability to provide," he said. French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that Western society has long used confinement, not treatment, to manage people labeled as "mad." Foucault believes that institutionalization of any kind all served the same purpose: to remove these people from the public eye when there is no other system to support them. The failed regional facility idea fits this pattern. When the project was abandoned, the jail remained the only institution with beds, staff and locked doors. Michael Rembis, author of "The New Asylums," argues that the criminalization of mental illness is not an accident but the result of policy decisions that dismantled psychiatric institutions without building alternatives. "Within this retelling, the criminalization of madness becomes an 'unintended consequence' of the failed attempt to move America's mental patients out of the back wards and into the community," Rembis writes. But once back in the community, these individuals didn't suddenly become well. They struggled to readjust and return to society. "In the waning decades of the twentieth century, as state hospitals emptied and many closed their doors permanently, both former patients and the newly mad increasingly found themselves alone and on the street or holed up in homes with overburdened, frustrated, exhausted or uncooperative and insensitive family members," Rembis said in his essay. "… The nation's failing mental health care system and its especially inadequate mental health care services have intensified the apparent shift in 'treatment' to new sites, including the criminal justice system, in most cases solely for political and economic reasons." Liat Ben-Moshe, author of "Decarcerating Disability," believes this way of thinking is reductionist and does not fully take into account the greater systemic issues at play. According to her, the U.S. never truly replaced psychiatric hospitals with community-based care. Instead, deinstitutionalization closed psychiatric facilities while failing to fund housing, crisis response and long-term supports. She calls this the "carceral continuum," a pipeline that moves disabled people from one form of confinement to the other. "Connecting deinstitutionalization to, not to mention blaming it on, the rise of the U.S. prison nation also leads one to believe that psych hospitals closed and led the same people to be incarcerated in prisons," she said. She also challenges the idea that jails are "mental health facilities" simply because they house people with mental illness. Carceral facilities need to provide adequate care, something she believes is occurring, but not well and through a process that is deeply dehumanizing and traumatic. "Psychiatric drugging, sensory deprivation and lack of human contact are not humane ways of treating people, especially those in psychiatric facilities, but ultimately anyone," she writes. "For psychiatric incarceration, in psych facilities or wards, this form of 'treatment' is being justified as therapeutic, for the incarcerated's own good. In prisons and jails, such treatment is justified on the basis of security, for the inmates' own good but also for the good of the other prisoners and ultimately of those not imprisoned." Handru believes law enforcement tries to keep people out of the criminal justice system, but without a secure treatment option, they have few choices. As for how to fix such a flawed system, no one seems to have any answers, but Cherson believes the solution begins with compassion. "When we think about how healthy our society is, we have to think about how healthy the least well off of us are," Cherson said. "What we encounter on a daily basis is people who are really unwell. We just tend to forget them and vilify them. I think that's really unfortunate for the spiritual health of the country." Ben-Moshe, Foucault and Rembis all argue that the answer is not building more jails, even specialized ones. Instead they call for actions like community-based crisis response, supportive housing, alternatives to law enforcement for psychiatric emergencies, Medicaid reform and expansion of state psychiatric beds. Handru argues that reform means politicians not using mental health to gain voter support but actually providing funding and resources to change the system. He believes management of current health challenges and improvement of the mental health system means collaborating across systems. "This is not just our problem," he said. "Nor is it solely a law enforcement problem. We will continue to work together to better serve residents struggling with mental illness." The abandoned Seneca County facility does not just represent a local problem. It is a symptom of a larger national crisis, where treatment is optional, but incarceration is guaranteed.