Editor,

Trish Nilsen’s letter on Wednesday, April 15 deserves further discussion. She laments the incident with the mentally ill patient at Whidbey General Hospital and the subsequent circus of accusations, trials and tarnished reputations. She further states that a patient like this has no business being held in a small, rural hospital like Whidbey General Hospital. Rather, the patient belongs in a specialized facility which doesn’t exist.

We can thank Ronald Reagan for closing most of the publicly funded mental hospitals in this country. These hospitals were supposed to be supplanted with thousands of community mental health centers throughout the country with specially trained clinicians. It never happened. Now our acutely mentally ill are often found in jails, on the streets, or in community hospitals where they are not receiving the treatment they need, and staff are at risk dealing with volatile patients who shouldn’t be there.

At all levels of government, money for treatment and facilities for the mentally ill has steadily decreased over the years. What are we thinking as a country when we choose to escalate the global nuclear arms race by spending more than $1 trillion dollars by the end of this century to rebuild and deploy a new fleet of Trident nuclear armed submarines, while our mentally ill are abandoned? And not to mention that if we ever used the missiles on just one of those subs, we as well as our targeted country or group would all be toast.

Certainly our government needs to address international threats, but the pendulum has swung to such an extreme that many of our domestic problems in this country are inadequately funded. We are a bountiful country with so much wealth and so many gifts. Let us rethink how we are spending this bounty.

LINDA MORRIS

Langley