More money needed for mentally ill, officials hear
February 12, 2009
Too many Texans with mental illness, the officials said, are winding up in emergency rooms and jails because they don't have access to consistent care and medication to prevent crises from developing.
Written by Brandi Grissom, The El Paso Times
AUSTIN -- Lawmakers should put $88 million into improving care for mentally ill Texans, local officials and mental-health advocates said Wednesday.
"We all want the same thing," El Paso County Commissioner Veronica Escobar said. "We all want an efficient, caring system."
Too many Texans with mental illness, the officials said, are winding up in emergency rooms and jails because they don't have access to consistent care and medication to prevent crises from developing.
More than 840,000 Texans suffer from serious mental illness, according to the Kaiser Family Health Foundation.
In El Paso, Escobar said, without more money about 1,500 patients would be placed on waiting lists to receive critical mental-health- care services and could end up in local jails or hospitals.
"That is not the adequate way to address the challenge of the mentally ill," she said.
Money for mental-health care was slashed in 2003 when the state faced a $10 billion budget shortfall.
State Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, said lawmakers took a big step toward repairing that hole in 2007 by approving $82 million for crisis treatment. But more must be done, he said, to ensure that patients get the care they need both after a crisis and to prevent one from developing.
"It's extremely important that communities have the money they need to serve people who are indigent and have mental illness," Coleman said.
Gary Larcenaire, executive director of El Paso Mental Health Mental Retardation,
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said money from 2007 allowed his agency to add more beds to treat patients in crisis.
About 225 people each month enter his center in a crisis, he said. That could be prevented with more state money.
"We've got a great crisis system in place now, but that is the most expensive place to treat patients," Larcenaire said. "We need the other half, which is that community-based support."
More money to support families that care for mentally ill loved ones and to keep the mentally ill off the streets would be a big help in El Paso, said Hector Morales, president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness El Paso.
"The state of Texas has to certainly do a paradigm change," he said, "from treating mental-health care as acute and going to chronic."
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