Health-care professionals at FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital have some big issues with their counterparts at Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh.

"There were many complaints about the Dorothea Dix admission office not returning calls and losing faxes," The News & Observer of Raleigh reported a week ago, quoting from an official report. "If Moore admits a mental patient awaiting admission at Dix, the state hospital will refuse to take the patient, even if appropriate [local] care is not being given."

Moore Regional isn't the only one experiencing repeated frustrations as it attempts to get help for troubled or psychotic patients that land in its lap. All across North Carolina, mental patients frequently undergo inexcusable neglect -- and sometimes downright inhuman treatment -- as they wait for bed space to open at one of the four sorely overcrowded and underfunded state-run psychiatric hospitals.

Clearly, something must be done about this disgraceful situation, which makes a mockery of the term medical "care" since it is evidently getting difficult if not impossible to find anyone within the state's broke and broken mental system who cares at all. Or maybe they're just exhausted beyond any display of compassion.

Shockingly Inhuman 'Care'

The internal report, commissioned by the state Department of Health and Human Services, surveyed Moore Regional and eight other hospitals about their experiences with seeking help for mental patients. Though the report was not intended to be public, The News & Observer of Raleigh and The Charlotte Observer obtained it through a public records request.

Incredibly, it is not unusual for acutely agitated or depressed patients to languish for days in hospital emergency rooms designed or intended to keep them for only minutes or hours. Hospital staff members seeking help for patients they are ill-equipped to treat experience mounting agitation of their own as indifferent or rude employees at state institutions fail to answer phones or acknowledge messages.

Sometimes, according to the report, patients who grow unruly as they await assistance end up being handcuffed or sedated with injections. When that doesn't work, law-enforcement officers may even resort to stunning them with Tasers. Such scenes seem more at home in the Soviet Gulag than in supposedly enlightened America.

Abject Failure of 'Mainstreaming'

All this results from a perfect storm of bad decisions and bad luck. Against a decades-old background of dubious but well-intentioned "mainstreaming" of mental patients who were thought to be better off receiving treatment in their hometowns, North Carolina instituted "reforms" in 2001 designed to downsize state facilities and emphasize community-based care. That movement failed miserably, squandering half a billion dollars and leaving many patients worse off than before.

Then came the financial meltdown of 2008, prompting this year's General Assembly and the administration of Gov. Bev Perdue to make drastic cuts in budgets, including slashing more than 350 jobs at state hospitals. An already terrible situation grew miserably worse. So far this year, the list of acutely mentally patients awaiting state care has ballooned to 3,700.

There are no easy answers, but Health and Human Services Secretary Lanier Cansler seems genuine in his determination to begin laying the groundwork for meaningful improvements. By the time the legislature convenes next spring, he should have the outlines of a proposed fix in place. Though the state has plenty of problems right now, it is hard to imagine any needing more urgent attention than this one.