Hundreds of mentally ill people who have been confined to nursing homes, sometimes in prisonlike conditions, would move to apartments or other housing within three years under a legal settlement with New York State.

State-supported mental health care, like many social services, has been especially vulnerable in the recent rounds of budget cuts. Over the past two years, some $1.6 billion has been slashed from non-Medicaid state spending on mental health, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But a growing number of law enforcement officials — along with mental health advocates — are voicing concerns that such cutbacks not only hurt mental health beneficiaries but also overburden the country’s prison system.

Reporting from Reno— The woman slouched on the steps of the rundown motel, her hair mussed, her pinkish outfit rumpled, her expression perplexed. Health officials were combing the brick-facade building where she lived for bed bugs as part of a multi-agency raid, while police banged on door after door, hunting for ex-felons.

Between April 2010 and March 2011, about 200 people across the state who were so mentally ill they posed a threat of serious harm to themselves or others were turned out on the street because no private psychiatric facility was willing to admit them, according to a new report.

When disaster strikes — whether a deadly supercell tornado, a flood, or man-made catastrophe — it is not just those with physical injuries and trauma-related disorders who suffer.

More than half of all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans treated in Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals since 2002 have been diagnosed, at least preliminarily, with mental health problems, according to statistics obtained by the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense.

The Justice Department has reached an agreement with Georgia over a long-running case involving what critics say is the unlawful segregation of residents with mental illness and developmental disabilities in state psychiatric hospitals.

Patient advocates filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday charging that New Jersey psychiatric hospitals routinely medicate patients against their will without a review by an outside arbiter, a practice that is banned in most other states.

Civil rights groups – including the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California – filed a class action lawsuit Monday against federal officials, demanding they create a system for determining the mental competency of those in immigration detention who represent themselves.

Milwaukee County comes under fire by state inspectors for shoddy conditions at the Mental Health Complex, including a series of fire and other patient safety violations, in three reports released Monday.