Once again the Inslee Administration is failing those who suffer from mental illness, this time it is negatively impacting the state’s young people who suffered greatly when the governor (and teachers’ unions) kept students 
away from in-person learning for longer than nearly every state in the country during the pandemic. The latest mental health blunder by the state government is that it is taking an incredible amount of time for bureaucrats to provide necessary licenses to sufficiently trained clinical psychologists.
License applicants complain they spend months, even years, constantly pestering state employees to move their paperwork through the process. That means Democrats are making it more difficult for many young people seeking treatment for mental difficulties, as they are forced to wait for appointments because there are not enough state-licensed psychologists to meet with them.
The Washington State Department of Health responded to the state’s latest mental health-related failure by claiming it is understaffed to process the nearly 400 applications which are currently pending. Thus, while the state government budget has more than doubled in size during Governor Jay Inslee’s first decade in office, it is evident the governor and Democrat legislators have never made helping those with mental illness a priority.
Among the many mental health related failures of the Inslee Administration are:
- Federal government decertifying Western State Hospital (the state’s largest mental health facility) due to poor administration (which cost taxpayers $53 million).
- Similar problems at Eastern State Hospital, the state’s other mental hospital.
- Failure to provide court-ordered treatment to criminal suspects, resulting in the state being levied millions of dollars in court fines and hundreds of mentally ill inmates suffering in local jails (and crime victims nervous about criminal suspects being set free by the courts). The Inslee Administration claims this failure is due to the pandemic, yet it has been a problem years before the first case of COVID hit our state.
- The Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families forcing children in the foster care system with mental difficulties to sleep in cars, offices, and hotels.
- Not providing adequate protection of staff at Western State Hospital, resulting in several lawsuits from staff members who were physically attacked by patients.
- Failure by administrators to follow state health and safety guidelines resulting in numerous COVID outbreaks at state mental health facilities.
- Western State Hospital hiring an individual with 22 felony convictions (and more pending) to be paid an annual salary of $41,600 as a patient counselor. His pay soon skyrocketed to $118,000. And he is currently the prime suspect in the theft of thousands of dollars from hospital patients.
As always, when faced with repetitive failures, the governor has repeatedly thrown more taxpayer money at the problem and increased the size of the bureaucracy. Yet like homelessness, more money never solves the issue. In fact, with both issues, more taxpayer funding and a larger bureaucracy have only made the problems get worse.
So while government union bosses collect more dues fees from more government employees, people continue to anguish due to poor administration and failed policies.
