The Shasta County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday will consider a grand jury report that sheds light on how the lack of mental health services and facilities puts patients in crisis at risk.
The supervisors should welcome the grand jury's recommendations, especially those that call for more law enforcement training and creating a mobile crisis response team.
The grand jury detailed in its report what happens 72 hours after a patient, family member or concerned resident calls authorities to help a mentally ill person in crisis.
What it found was a woeful lack of services, personnel and facilities. These shortages can leave mentally ill people lingering in local emergency rooms for days and weeks for the mental health help they desperately need. A lack of crisis intervention training for local law enforcement officers means some encounters take a deadly turn for the worse. A walk-in clinic with banker's hours and that only offers therapy services for those on Medi-Cal leaves gaping holes in care filled in by emergency rooms, if at all. For children and teenagers in crisis, there are no local services at all.
The grand jury found no one simple solution. Instead, it offered a variety of recommendations.
Law enforcement officers, often the first to try to help a mentally ill person exhibiting destructive behavior, need more training, the report says. Only 50 percent to 60 percent of local law officers have crisis intervention training beyond what they got while attending police academy, the grand jury found. That training gives officers the skills they need to calm down a person in crisis so the patient and officers don't get hurt.
The grand jury also called on the county to add more hours to its walk-in services, a plan already underway as county officials work to open a second mental health facility that would provide a range of services during evenings and weekends.
One more novel suggestion encourages the county Health and Human Services Agency and local law enforcement agencies to create a mobile crisis response team. The team of mental health professionals, police officers and deputies would be dispatched to mental health emergencies. Rather than providing an exclusive law enforcement response, the unit would include mental health experts trained in de-escalating mental health crises.
The grand jury suggested using money from the Mental Health Services Act, the so-called millionaire's tax, to fund the response team. The county gets about $9 million a year from the tax, money that must go to innovative programs.
Even if the county implements the response team and adds more hours to its walk-in clinic, it only has 16 inpatient beds for mentally ill adults who need long-term care. When that privately run facility, Restpadd, is full, the county has to find other places for those on Medi-Cal who need inpatient care. In some cases, patients are sent as far as San Diego.
We've long pointed out the holes in mental health care in the county, most comprehensively in reporter Alayna Shulman's Fragments of Care series last year that explored how the lack of mental health services affects residents, law enforcement, health officials and the most vulnerable among us. Leon Evans from the Restoration Center in San Antonio spoke to community leaders about how his program helps connect people who otherwise may end up in jail to the mental health services they need. His talk has encouraged local leaders to look to open a sobering center — one part of the overall equation of mental illness, addiction and homelessness the Restoration Center addresses.
The grand jury report adds much to this community conversation, and Shasta County CEO Larry Lees encourages the supervisors to look into implementing the recommendations.
We join him in that.
June 27, 2016
Redding Record Searchlight
Editorial
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