Experts discuss gaps in mental health services

Mental health issues are a growing concern on many levels, whether it is in schools, where identifying children early and providing them with support and programs to treat the issues creates the building blocks for society, or on the criminal justice level, where 33 percent of inmates in state prisons suffer from a mental issue and 75 percent of those individuals also have a substance abuse disorder.

Experts in these fields spoke to various Carbon County agencies during the recent Human Services Priorities Breakfast about what is being done and what work still needs to be done to best fill the gaps in mental health services.

Mental health in schools

Tim Tkach, assistant to the superintendent at Lehighton Area School District, spoke about the impact of mental health issues on the student body and ways the school district is working to help.

“Mental health issues, drug and alcohol problems are the same thing to me as cancer,” Tkach said. “For so long, it was a big taboo about mental health that you wanted to hide it. You can’t do that. You have to address it. You have to take your head out of the sand and face it head-on.”

He said that as a school district, proactive steps such as hiring two social workers, three school psychologists and starting family-oriented programs to help families as a whole are showing promise in that kids are getting the help they need at an earlier age and showing growth from it.

Tkach spoke about a recent overdose death of a student’s parent and about how events such as the loss of their parents affects them on many levels.

“Imagine the impact of something like this on these kids,” he said. “They are coming into the schools with that baggage and we’re wondering, ‘Did you do your homework?’ That’s not right. As an educator, our job is to make a connection with the kids. You don’t know what they’re coming from, so you gotta be real. You gotta be genuine and you gotta be sincere.”

In the fall, Tkach said that the district is helping parents by starting the Teach Me to Read program for preschool-aged children and their parents.

“It’s so important to get the jump on them at an early age to give them the skills, the coping mechanisms to help them deal and help them understand,” he said.

Tkach said that no matter what school district you live in, mental health issues are becoming less of a stigma through various programs schools are putting in.

“We cannot run and bury our heads in the sand and say it is not here,” he said. “It is here, and it is our responsibility to say we are going to help.”

Mental health in prisons

In the criminal justice system, John Wetzel, state secretary of corrections, said that solutions start on the county level through creative programs for diversion rather than over-incarceration.

Since the two lawsuits filed against the state in 2011 over the poor mental health system in the criminal justice system, Wetzel said the way of thinking in his department shifted from reactive to more proactive approaches. Mental health programs in the prison system now cost the state approximately $40 million a year for services to incarcerated individuals.

“We need to be more forward thinking and investing on the local level before people get here (state prison),” he said. “The deeper someone gets into the criminal justice system, the less likely they are to be successful when they get out.”

To accomplish this, Wetzel said proactive approaches such as specialty courts, intermediate punishment programs and other diversionary approaches are finding positive ways to get mental health treatment for those individuals who committed crimes and need help.

“The question is, is locking them up the most effective use of taxpayer dollars?” Wetzel asked. “I would say no. If someone becomes criminally involved in the front end of our system, when they leave the back end of our system, we want them less likely to commit another crime. Part of that means addressing the root cause of the crime.

“We need to figure out how we can fill the cracks so someone doesn’t slip through and end up at a state prison,” he said.

To accomplish this, starting on the local level is key to it being a success on the state level, but funding these local programs is lacking at this time.

Locally, Carbon County has been using diversion programs such as veterans and drug treatment courts, forensic case management in the prison, intermediate punishment programs and the re-entry program that aims to help a person leaving incarceration get set up to reintegrate into society, to help these individuals.

Tina Clymer, administrator of the Carbon-Monroe-Pike Mental Health/Developmental Services, said that there are six forensic case managers in the county who work with the prison to identify those with mental health issues and get them started on services while incarcerated and moving through the criminal justice system.

Wetzel pointed out that Carbon County is a good example of a small county coming together to utilize individual relationships to leverage services that the state can’t supply.

Wetzel also spoke about a study completed in Dauphin County that looked at people coming into the county prison to see how well the jail was identifying those who were known to the behavioral health system and how many got the services they needed while incarcerated and continued after finishing their sentence.

The result showed the average percentage of correctly identified individuals coming into the prison with mental health issues and already known to behavioral health systems was 17 percent.

Because of studies like this, an initiative called Stepping Up for Mental Health began and aims to develop a common language between the prison system and behavioral health system to better identify those who need help and then obtain the services while incarcerated.