Gov. Ted Strickland has told his people to figure out how to minimize the fallout of closing Dayton's Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare.

It can't be done. There's a will; just no way.

Twin Valley is a 110-bed psychiatric facility on Wayne Avenue that treats severely mentally ill people. Many patients are a probable danger to themselves or others.

With the closing, Dayton is losing a life-saving institution. In the future, patients will be told to go to Cincinnati or Columbus, making it difficult for families to be part of their treatment plans.

Family support is critical to preventing the revolving-door syndrome in which mentally ill patients are in and out of hospitals without ever getting or staying well.

At the same time, local hospitals are worried about what they're going to do with mentally ill patients who will end up in their already crowded emergency rooms. The patients need help, but not the trauma care that ERs provide.

Meanwhile, Wright State's medical school is losing a teaching facility that has been critical to turning out doctors and psychiatrists who have had learning experiences with extremely troubled people. Over a year, 100 medical students pass through Twin Valley, working with patients whose illnesses are not common but that every doctor eventually encounters.

In addition, 40 psychiatric residents do four-month stints at Twin Valley each year.

This work is not just important to the students, but, ironically, to the state. Dr. Jerald Kay, chairman of the department of psychiatry, can point to 40 psychiatrists who graduated from Wright State and trained at Twin Valley who work in the public sector today. He says that their Twin Valley experience was invariably central to their decision to work in public mental health.

Wright-Patterson is in an equally bad spot.

The Air Force could decide not to put its psychiatric residents at Wright-Patterson if there's no place for them to be exposed to patients in intensive treatment.

Losing residents will matter not just to Wright State and Wright-Patterson, but also to the local community. It, after all, gets residents' services at a reduced cost.

When Gov. Strickland's team decided to close Twin Valley, it made that decision with no understanding of how it's destroying medical training opportunities. Since the administration has been filled in on the consequences of its plan, committees have been created to look into the problem.

The state says it might be willing to give Twin Valley to local hospitals. But why would the hospitals decide to fill the void the governor has created? State psychiatric hospitals exist because no one else has the money to run them.

In the end, Gov. Strickland is, by closing Twin Valley, making Dayton absorb a disproportionate share of the budget cuts that the entire mental health department has to make. A much smaller facility in Cambridge is being shuttered, too, but no other urban area is taking the hit that Dayton is.

The department's defense is that consolidation makes sense because the savings is ongoing, and because Dayton's and Cambridge's facilities were in the poorest physical shape.

Both points are indeed true.

But mental health officials know that they're not consolidating manufacturing plants or corporate back offices. The reason places like Twin Valley are scattered around the state is that their services are most effective if they're taken to where patients and their families are. As to facilities, it's not Dayton's fault that the state chose not to invest in its institution.

Dayton never had a chance to make the case for Twin Valley's importance until the decision was set in concrete. Essentially the community was run over, and then the governor's people created task forces to see if leaders here could imagine a solution for the governor's mistake.

Mr. Strickland may as well have sent a cheap get well card. It would have been as helpful.

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