The South Carolina Department of Mental Health primarily serves people who continue to live in their homes while receiving assistance.
“We treat over 100,000 patients every year… and 98% of those people we treat in the community,” said the agency’s acting state director, Dr. Robert Bank, during a speech to the Rotary Club of Aiken on Monday at Newberry Hall.
The Aiken-Barnwell Mental Health Center in Aiken and other similar facilities in the state “help keep patients on their medicine, in their counseling and out of emergency rooms in hospitals,” Bank told the Rotarians. “That is our goal, to keep them at home and functioning. And all of our centers do a wonderful job of bringing that about.”
Many of the Department of Mental Health’s patients are young people.
“Of all those patients that we treat through our mental health centers, 30% of them are children and adolescents,” Bank said. “We meet many of them in their schools, which makes it much more convenient for them to get their treatments. We are in over 600 schools, and we are aiming to be in more because that is the best way, to meet the children where they are and do the preventive work that we need to continue to do.”
The Department of Mental health continues to run inpatient hospitals, but the number of people admitted to them is down significantly.
“You might think of the Department of Mental Health as the old Bull Street Campus (in Columbia),” Bank said. “Well, if you’ve been there lately, you know it has been completely renovated into a commercial area with a baseball park and all that sort of thing.
“Most of our in-house hospital work is done in Columbia and Anderson,” he continued. “We still have approximately 500 psychiatric beds. That’s in contrast to 50 years ago, when we had 5,000 psychiatric beds.”
The reasons for the reduction are “the modern methods [of treatment] that were developed, the counseling we have available and the mental health centers that we have spread all over the state,” Bank said.
Dr. Chad Pollock, deputy director of medical affairs for the Department of Mental Health, also spoke to the Rotary Club of Aiken on Monday about the agency’s efforts to assist inmates at the Aiken County detention center.
