and received its first accreditation by the newly formed Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (now called the Joint Commission on Accreditation

of Health Care Organizations -- JCAHO).
                             

In those days, there were no psychiatric units of general hospitals in Westchester County, and the hospital was one of five private psychiatric hospitals--all in Westchester--serving the entire New York City area. Rye Hospital Center (formerly called Rye Psychiatric Hospital Center) was formed in 1971 by a group of doctors.

The hospital has earned full accreditation by the JCAHO throughout its more than 35 years of proud existence, treating thousands of people of all ages with emotional disorders. Because its medical director was one of the early researchers of the use of lithium, it was among the first to use lithium therapy for Manic-Depressive Illness (now called Bi-Polar Disorder). Notwithstanding the advent of new medications to treat the serious mentally ill, which allowed the state hospitals to discharge the overwhelming majority of their patients, inadequate community resources contributed to creating more mentally ill homeless in proportion to the population than existed after the Great Depression.

Indeed, because frequent or long-term institutionalization, especially for young people with disabilities, isolates them from society often for long periods, the government and the U.S. Supreme Court (Olmstead v. L.C.) have taken notice of the need for "transition services" to enable young people to become better prepared to integrate their functioning in community life when they reach adulthood. (Click here to see "Rye's Transition Services.")

Before deinstitutionalization, the state-run hospitals in New York alone had more inpatients than are hospitalized at present in all state hospitals in the US, reflecting today's need for care of the mentally ill and the paucity of quality inpatient resources to treat them. Today, too, because of the managed-care practice of "drive-through" stays in general hospital psychiatric units, and private psychiatric hospitals as well, there is a burgeoning of serious and persistent mentally ill residing in the communities, leading to a churning of patients with frequent readmissions.

Rye Hospital Center is proud of its historically low rate of readmissions as it continues to wrestle with "managed care" to maintain the appropriate length-of-stay for each patient.