Disciplinary records on medical employees working at Texas’s 10 state mental hospitals reveal that physical abuse is common when it comes to treating patients.

Seventy-two workers have been fired in the past three years over allegations of abuse, according to personnel records obtained by The Dallas Morning News. Moreover, hundreds of other workers have been fired for violations (chokeholds, headlocks and threats against patients), including sleeping on the job and overmedicating patients.

There are about 18,000 patients and about 7,400 employees working in the state psychiatric hospital system.

State officials say there will always be reports of abuse and neglect in an institutional setting. They also say they are always taking this kind of behavior seriously. However, the newspaper reported records showing that abuse and neglect in state-run facilities are systemic.

According to Doug McBride, a representative for the Department of State Health Services, psychiatric hospitals are stressful environments, acknowledging there are times when employees “do not handle a situation appropriately.”

Texas juvenile prisons, group homes for the disabled and state schools for people with mental disabilities, came under fire in the past year for reports of widespread physical and sexual abuse. There were 137 confirmed abuse cases in 2007 in Texas’s psychiatric hospitals, which have about 2,500 patients daily. The state schools for people with disabilities, which have twice as many residents, have an average of 300 confirmed abuse cases per year.

Lack of money seems to be an important issue for these hospitals, thus contributing to tensions among their personnel and inability to treat patients properly.

“You get what you pay for. When you financially dumb something down, you make services cheap, something's got to give. Unfortunately, it usually ends up being a mentally ill or disabled Texan,” said Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, who has bipolar disorder.

"It's a population that's easy to abuse because they're not on the radar in any way," said Richard Hansen, a Texas mental health advocate who was chemically restrained, shackled and beaten to the point of broken ribs years ago while suffering from bipolar disorder in a New York mental hospital.

The state funds only 27 percent of mental needs in the community, according to Aaryce Hayes, a mental health policy specialist with Advocacy Inc.

“If we said we were serving just 27 percent of people who had cancer, or diabetes, nobody would be comfortable with that,” Ms. Hayes said.

There are more than 450,000 adult Texans with serious and persistent mental illness, everything from schizophrenia to major depression, she added.