alexadra carter

I strongly oppose HB 1372. Reestablishing a state psychiatric hospital for long-term institutionalization is not a forward-thinking mental health solution—it is a step backward toward a failed and harmful model of care. For decades, this country has worked to move away from warehousing people with severe mental illness in large state institutions. Those facilities were historically underfunded, isolated, and rife with abuse, neglect, and civil rights violations. The solution to today’s mental health crisis is not to rebuild what we dismantled—it is to finally fund and strengthen the community-based systems that were supposed to replace it. This bill frames incarceration, homelessness, and emergency room boarding as justification for a new institution. But those failures are the result of chronic underinvestment in community mental health services, supportive housing, mobile crisis teams, peer support, and outpatient treatment. Building another state hospital risks diverting attention and resources away from the very services that prevent people from reaching crisis in the first place. Progressive mental health policy centers dignity, autonomy, integration, and recovery—not segregation and confinement. Large, centralized institutions are expensive to build, difficult to staff, and historically prone to becoming warehouses when funding tightens. Expanding long-term inpatient beds may sound like action, but it does not address the root causes of mental health system breakdown: lack of housing, workforce shortages, and insufficient early intervention. If individuals with severe mental illness are cycling through jails and ERs, that is a failure of our community infrastructure—not evidence that institutionalization is the answer. New Hampshire should invest in: • Permanent supportive housing • Fully funded community mental health centers • Crisis stabilization units • Workforce development for behavioral health professionals • Diversion programs that keep people out of jails Studying how to rebuild a state psychiatric hospital sends the wrong message about our priorities and risks normalizing a return to institutional models that history has already judged harshly. We need modern, humane, community-centered solutions, not a revival of the failures of the past. For these reasons, HB 1372 should be rejected.