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AUSTIN—More than 70 employees at Texas’ 10 state mental hospitals have been fired and dozens others disciplined since 2005 over allegations of brutal beatings and other physical abuse, according to a newspaper report.

Disciplinary records obtained by The Dallas Morning News show the violence against patients included chokeholds, headlocks and threats. Hundreds of other employees have been fired for other violations, including sleeping on the job and overmedicating patients, the records show.

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. And they say they take any allegations of mistreatment seriously. But the records show that as in other state-run facilities, abuse and neglect are systemic, the newspaper reported Sunday.

Texas juvenile prisons, group homes for the disabled, and state schools for people with mental disabilities all came under fire last year for reports of widespread physical and sexual abuse. The state psychiatric hospitals, like other systems for vulnerable Texans, are chronically starved for cash, advocates of more state funding say, and services at the local level can’t keep up.

“You get what you pay for,” said Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, who has bipolar disorder. “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.”

Officials with the Department of State Health Services, the agency that runs the psychiatric hospitals, say abuse and neglect are “absolutely not” pervasive — and verified cases are actually dropping.

In the past two years, they confirmed 15 “Class I” cases — the most serious abuse. On average, investigators substantiate 5 percent of the more than 2,000 allegations they examine annually. And nearly 90 percent of patient deaths since 2005 were attributed to natural causes, agency spokesman Doug McBride said. Five were suicides, and none were the result of abuse.

State officials acknowledge that the psychiatric hospitals are stressful environments; there are times, McBride said, when employees “do not handle a situation appropriately.” But they say the rules for reporting abuse and neglect are stringent and confirmed cases of physical and sexual abuse are reported to police.

And they balk at the suggestion that conditions bear a resemblance to the state schools for people with mental disabilities, where the U.S. Justice Department has intervened twice in recent years.

The psychiatric hospitals, which have about 2,500 patients daily, had 137 confirmed abuse cases in 2007. The state schools for people with disabilities, which have twice as many residents, have an average of 300 confirmed abuse cases per year.

But some advocates fear the mentally ill patients may face greater risks. Patients of the psychiatric hospitals are largely indigent, transient and not connected to their families, so they have few allies as they bounce through the mental health system.

“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.

But there are few alternatives, advocates say, because smaller community-based services are as strapped as the state system.

Other employees were punished for offensive treatment, from using racial slurs on patients to making verbal threats and sexual advances. Some ignored patients’ cries for help while they watched TV, played video games and wrote text messages. Others stole state property and sold tobacco products to patients.

McBride said employees are carefully screened and are terminated the moment they’re found unfit for their jobs.

Hansen said many employees are conscientious, but conditions vary from hospital to hospital and ward to ward. Some are simply warehouses, where patients are often overmedicated and ignored. In others, patients frequently turn up with unexplained injuries, he said.

Aaryce Hayes, a mental health policy specialist with Advocacy Inc., said the Department of State Health Services is working to improve the state hospital system, from incorporating trauma-informed treatment into care regimens to increasing employee empathy training. It is also trying to reduce reliance on restraint and seclusion to keep control of patients.

But it’s hard to improve when the state hospital system is so overburdened, she said. Right now, the state funds just 27 percent of mental health needs in the community. There are more than 450,000 adult Texans with serious and persistent mental illness, everything from schizophrenia to major depression, she said.

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

Texas ranks 48th in the country in per capita funding for people with mental illness.