The next governor will be asked to repair North Carolina's fractured mental health system, which has wasted money, left sick people without adequate care, and cost lives.

The News & Observer recently reported that the state had wasted at least $400 million on a basic service called community support and had spent too little on treatment of serious mental illness.

While some people are getting services they don't need from private companies, more people are going to state mental hospitals for short stays. These short stays stabilize patients in crises but have little therapeutic value.

The N&O report also revealed that since December 2000, 192 employees had abused 82 patients at the four mental hospitals run by the state, and 82 patients had died under questionable circumstances.

Do the candidates for governor have ideas about what to do?

Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, wants to expand networks of clinics and primary-care doctors that already treat Medicaid patients to include mental health treatment. Some parts of the state are already testing that plan.

Four of the six candidates are willing to return some responsibilities for patients' care to local mental health offices, which were forced to give up most responsibility for providing care in a 2001 rewrite of mental health laws.

Three Republican candidates said they want to track down private companies that have committed fraud. Former Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr wants to know who pushed for rules that allowed questionable companies to make millions. "This is probably the biggest and most embarrassing scandal in state government in my lifetime," he said.

In separate interviews, The News & Observer asked the major candidates how they would fix the problems plaguing the mental health system. Find their answers by clicking on the link under "Related Content," in the column to the right of this story.

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