Calaveras County Unveils Plan to Aid Mentally Ill Residents

By County Of Calaveras — Behavioral Health Services, The Record, Stockton, Calif.

Apr. 18–SAN ANDREAS – Calaveras County officials Monday unveiled an ambitious plan to greatly reduce, if not end, the suffering of mentally ill residents by providing whatever help they need, whether housing, job training, counseling or other assistance.

The plan will be funded with more than $600,000 a year from the Proposition 63 tax on millionaires state voters approved in 2004.

“This money is to expand services, not supplant what we were already doing,” said Jeanne Boyce, director of the county’s Health Services Agency. “Prop. 63 funding is the first infusion of new money in the mental health system since the late 1960s.”

Officials admit that the county’s mental health services are as understaffed and decrepit as the County Jail, which all too often houses mentally ill people who slip through the cracks in the mental health care system.

In January, a draft report from the county’s Mental Health Advisory Board revealed that mentally ill people often spend days or weeks in the jail before receiving adequate care.

The plan released Monday includes statements from mental health patients and their relatives that echo those concerns. “There was no help available, even when we could have paid,” wrote one relative of a schizophrenic child who responded to the survey.

Boyce said one of the biggest challenges will be hiring enough workers with the right training to get the job done. Rather than simply treating mental health problems on a crisis-by-crisis basis, the new system will seek to guide people to full, healthy lives.

“Every county is looking for staff,” Boyce said.

Calaveras County plans to hire nine full-time employees and four part-time workers to handle the job. In addition, the county will expand recruitment of peer counselors and others who can reach into the community and get people help.

Rita Downs, director of Mental Health Services, said that surveys done over the past year found that only 3.5 percent of the senior citizens who need mental health services seek treatment.

“That’s shameful,” Supervisor Merita Callaway said at the Board of Supervisors study session where officials presented the plan.

That’s why the system must be transformed into one that emphasizes health rather than crisis, Downs said.

“What we were clearly asked to do by the older adults was to see them in their homes,” Downs said.

Monday’s session started a monthlong period of public comment on the plan that will culminate with a public hearing May 18. Then county officials will submit the plan for state approval.

Contact reporter Dana M. Nichols at (209) 754-9534 or dnichols@recordnet.com

—–

Copyright (c) 2006, The Record, Stockton, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.