In 2016 the Department of Justice claimed that the state of Louisiana was unnecessarily relying on nursing homes to serve people with a serious mental illness. 

Now, the Department of Health is working on assessing over 2,000 patients with mental illness to see if these patients could benefit from different living somewhere else. 

“It’s not an easy thing to fix, it’s not a quick thing to fix. It all takes time and in the meantime, we’ve got people who are slipping through the cracks,” says Karen DuBois with the National Alliance on Mental Health. 

Over the next 18 months, the state will be assisting more than 2,500 mentally ill people currently living in nursing homes. 

“When someone is looking for a place to put someone because they cannot care for them themselves it may not be because they are elderly, so you are going to have people in nursing homes who are not elderly,” says DuBois. 

Louisiana doesn’t have many long-term living facilities for people with mental illness. DuBois says this is why there are so many with mental illness in nursing homes. The department of health says even after evaluations patients will still have the option to stay in nursing home settings. 

“What we have to do is acknowledge that there are people in nursing homes who have mental illness, and if they are going to have to be there because there is a nowhere else for them to go then we’ve got to make sure that the care for them includes dealing with mental illnesses,” says DuBois.