Mental health issue draws a crowd

HELENA — Annette Russ told a legislative budget panel Thursday that when her son was released from Montana State Prison recently, he had a 10-day furlough and no medication for his schizophrenia — and quickly had a “psychotic episode.”

With no options for local treatment, he was sent back to prison, put in isolation for nine weeks and eventually kept there on “medical hold” because the state had nowhere else to treat his acute psychosis, she said.

“This travesty could have been avoided if there were community services available,” she said. “Additional secure beds in the community would give the state another alternative to incarceration ... This is not just my family and my son’s story. This is the story about a lot of Montana families and their sons and daughters.”

Russ joined a parade of parents, patients, health professionals and law officers who urged the Legislature to put more funding into local mental-health services — and not necessarily into state institutions such as the State Hospital at Warm Springs.

“Recovery happens in the community, not in the hospital,” said Michelle Lewis of Butte, who said she has suffered from mental illness and gone to the State Hospital multiple times. “Stabilization may happen in the hospital, but ... what kind of relationships do you build in a hospital?”

Gov. Steve Bullock has proposed a $20 million increase in state funding for mental health programs, but $12.5 million of his proposal would build and staff new units at the state hospital and nursing home, which is in Lewistown.

Bullock’s plan also includes $7 million of additional money for local programs to treat mental health, over the next two years.

Some 60 people testified Thursday on the budget proposal before the Joint Appropriations Committee on Health and Human Services, which will take some of the first votes on Bullock’s plans.

Nearly all of them spoke in favor of putting more money into community-based treatment programs for the mentally ill, saying patients do better when they’re treated close to their home.

They also said that local programs, if properly funded, can help divert people from the State Hospital, which has been overflowing with patients.

Ravalli County Sheriff Chris Hoffmann said law officers from around the state spend too much time transporting mentally ill people hundreds of miles to the State Hospital, because local options for care often don’t exist.

“We’re not here to diss one plan and support another,” he said. “I would just like to say, local services are working. They are game-changing. They are making a difference in people’s lives.”

Hoffmann and others also said the state needs a strategic plan to deal with mental illness, rather than competing plans and a patchwork of proposals.

“I am impressed by the absence of a strategic plan for mental-health services, particularly community mental-health services in the state of Montana,” said John Wilkinson of Helena, whose son recently was paroled from the State Hospital to a local program. “It would be wonderful if the governor could work with the Legislature in developing that type of plan.”