Pleas made for mental-health money in Virginia

By REX BOWMAN
RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
Published: September 23, 2008

Mental-health-care reforms undertaken after the Virginia Tech massacre are in danger of being undone if the state carries out a plan to slash spending, advocates and leaders said Monday.

The mental-health-care advocates and law-enforcement officials are urging Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to shield mental-health services from the pending state budget cuts.

“It will be a real setback, both locally and statewide,“ said Tom Spurlock, a Roanoke father of a mentally ill son and a member of the board of Virginia’s affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Spurlock joined 10 other advocates and officials to describe a statewide mental-health system near exhaustion, with a shortage of psychiatric beds at the state’s four mental hospitals, emergency rooms at local hospitals crowded with mental patients unable to get state care and jails struggling to care for mentally ill inmates because they have nowhere else to go.

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Roanoke County Sheriff Gerald Holt said that, at any given time, 60 to 70 of the 300 inmates in his jail have been diagnosed with mental illness, and his staff is not equipped to deal with them.

“We’re at a point now where we don’t have a safety net if there’s a failure of any part of the system,“ said Katie VanPatten, director of the Court-Community Corrections program, which oversees court-ordered programs from Salem north to Bath County. “The jail is the backup system.“

VanPatten and the others said the budget cuts being considered would damage the state’s ability to care for the mentally ill through its four mental hospitals and 40 community-services boards.

Kaine has asked all departments, including the state Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services, to prepare three sets of budgets for fiscal 2009-10: one reflecting cuts of 5 percent, one of 10 percent and one of 15 percent.

Anticipating a shortfall of revenue from the struggling economy, Kaine hopes to pare the two-year, $77 billion budget that funds state operations from July 1, 2008, through June 30, 2010.

Meghan McGuire, spokeswoman for the mental-health department, said a 5 percent cut would mean a drop of $21.5 million in the department’s fiscal 2009 budget, a 10 percent cut would mean the loss of $43 million and a 15 percent cut would translate into $64.5 million less.

Those budget projections were given to the state secretary of health and human resources last week and will be forwarded to Kaine, who will decide how much to cut from departments. McGuire declined to speculate on what the budget cuts will mean in terms of mental-health services.

Kaine spokesman Gordon Hickey said the governor is sensitive to the needs of the mentally ill. “The governor considers mental-health services a core service, and he is well aware of the concerns about any potential cuts there, and he will take these concerns into consideration.“ That being said, Hickey added, “everything is on the table.“

The General Assembly this year passed bills intended to shore up the state’s mental-health system. The legislation, signed into law by Kaine, clarified the criteria to be met before a person can be involuntarily committed to treatment, established new procedures for mandatory outpatient treatment and spelled out the rules requiring mental health workers to keep tabs on those ordered to undergo outpatient treatment.

The legislation was the direct result of gunman Seung-Hui Cho’s slaying of 32 students and teachers at Tech last year: Cho had been ordered to undergo outpatient treatment but disappeared from view after making one appointment at a clinic and never showing up again.

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Any benefit from the legislation could unravel if budget cuts reduce the roughly 1,660 psychiatric beds available at public facilities statewide, according to the mental-health-care advocates.

“Cuts are going to directly impact the capacity of our system, which is already overwhelmed,“ said Tim Steller, executive director of Blue Ridge Behavioral Health, the community-services board that serves Roanoke and Salem and the counties of Roanoke, Botetourt and Craig.

Contact Rex Bowman at (540) 344-3612 or .