The future of the Dorothea Dix property in Raleigh — the site of the former mental hospital — has been the source of much aggressive debate in the General Assembly recently.
But the tone of the debate itself reveals a set of seriously scrambled priorities. No side fully respects the historical significance of the property or recognizes the needs of the mental health community.
Some legislators want all 300 acres of the property to be repurposed as a “destination park,” while others think there should be space reserved for administrative offices or the property should be expanded.
Instead, the land should be returned to the Department of Health and Human Services and used for the good of the people who have been hurt the most and forgotten amidst the planning: the mentally ill of North Carolina.
When mental health advocate Dorothea Dix came to the state in 1848, the mental health care system was disorganized and defective. The government provided little effective assistance, and many of the mentally ill were in jails or out on the street. Dix brought this crisis to the attention of the General Assembly and worked tirelessly to bring about reform.
The first land was bought for the hospital in 1850 and the first patient was admitted in 1856. The hospital and its mission of care and service continued to expand over time until it reached its height in 1974. At that time, the property had 2,354 acres of land, including a farm and three lakes, and it was equipped to handle 2,756 patients.
All of the land was operated with the interests of the mental health community in mind, and the patients’ recovery and well-being were the end goals.
The land has been slowly sold away since the ’70s, and the hospital shut down for good last year. It would be acceptable if this simply represented a decentralizing of mental health services and a careful shift away from institutional care — but mental health care in North Carolina is tragically underfunded, and Dix’s impact seems to be fading.
In 2010, the public mental health system only served 34 percent of adults with serious mental illnesses in North Carolina, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and it can only have gotten worse since then. The new state budget proposals would cut even more funds from an already struggling system.
