Regarding “Respite center commits to secure rooms” (The Daily Astorian, Feb. 18): Secure rooms? That means, if I read it correctly, that “patients” — and who called these folks patients anyway — are going to be locked in.

If they are locked in, then who locks them in? A judge? How can one be deprived of liberty without due process? As I understand it, the “residents” of the “respite center” are most likely to be homeless people who are picked up for allegedly committing some crime or public nuisance, but not run-of-the-mlll homeless — whether mentally ill or not. Are they going to be referred from the jail? Or from the policeman on the beat? Or the Emergency Department? Or can anyone just call up and say, “My wife is nuts. Come and lock her up.”

If “patients” are not “free to walk away” — and presumably, most of those “patients” will have been free (probably homeless) before they were placed in the “respite center” — are they then being held against their will, and effectively prisoners? If they aren’t prisoners, why couldn’t they “just walk away”?

Who is going to keep the keys? Who is going to supervise these “secure rooms’? Is there to be a sheriff deputy or Warrenton policeman on duty 24/7? What if they do go violent or berserk? Will they be taken to jail? Is someone going to medicate the psychotic residents? Who? Clatsop Behavioral Health can’t manage what they are doing right now. It beggars belief that they could supervise 16 “inpatients” — four of whom might be “violent”.

I really don’t understand what is going on, and I hope there will be some more in-depth reporting. Mental illness is a complex problem that governments worldwide just hope will go away, but it won’t. And it costs a lot of money to even begin to deal effectively with that problem. I’m not convinced that Clatsop County has really thought this through.

I applaud the various agencies involved for their concern and effort, but there seem to be too many loose ends and too little transparency about goals, required resources and detailed operating systems at the present time.

Easy to build buildings. Much more difficult (and expensive) to create a functional organization. This has the makings of an embarrassing fiasco.

Tom Duncan

Astoria