Despite $19.7 million in overall budget cuts for the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, local services will not be cut, at least not for now, according to the department’s executive director.
Diana Mikula spoke Wednesday night at a meeting of the Greenwood Voters League.
Mikula appeared alongside Life Help Executive Director Phaedre Cole, who directs community-based mental health care for a 12-county area including Leflore County.
Mikula said her department will have to cut 650 employees as of June 30, 2018, to meet budget demands. She expects to meet most of those cuts by retiring personnel, freezing positions, not making any new hires and eliminating positions that do not directly impact community-based services like those offered locally by Life Help.
“We will be transitioning some state programs to community mental health centers like Life Help,” Mikula said, adding that her department has had to cease all mental health admissions to nursing homes, cut mental health programs at five regional centers providing in-patient treatment, and cap home and community-based waivers for intellectually developmentally disabled individuals.
“Y’all are fortunate to have mental health crisis units here through Life Help,” she said.
Mikula in no way implied that those in attendance should not be worried about mental health services, and she urged them to contact their state legislators to let them know how their families had been personally affected.
Placement at state hospitals for acute care has become more limited with budget cuts, and currently those beds have waiting lists.
Mikula said her best advice is to utilize community-based services, such as those offered at Life Help, to avoid the need for hospitalization down the line.
“I’m an advocate for a continuum of care,” Mikula said. “Everybody should have services available whenever they need them.”
The state currently is not able to meet all of those needs, she said.
Cole told those gathered that “you hope no one in your family will ever need mental services, but chances are they will.”
Cole said she was grateful that Mikula and the Department of Mental Health Board have made community-based services a top priority.
“We have more than 625 employees currently,” she said. “There will be no reduction in force, no layoffs at Life Help.”
Still, with cuts at the state office, community service centers such as Life Help can expect to take on more patients while holding steady at their level of staffing.
“I’ve always asked my staff to do more with less,” Cole said. “Now I’m asking them to do much more with much less.”
Life Help offers mobile crisis teams for mental health emergencies, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week; chemical dependency programs; therapy in a clinic setting; a variety of home services; and two crisis centers, including the 16-bed acute crisis center at Greenwood Leflore Hospital.
Those beds are sometimes filled with patients awaiting placement at a state facility, Cole said, but the hope is that with crisis counseling and regulating their medications, they might be sent back to community-based care.
A question-and-answer session followed presentations by Mikula and Cole. State Sen. David Jordan, president of the Voters League, asked about the opioid epidemic in Mississippi and how the state is dealing with it.
Mikula said prescription drug abuse had risen by 400 percent in Mississippi over the last decade, and last year Mississippi saw 486 overdoses with 81 percent of those the direct result of opioid addiction.
“As of 2015, one in six Mississippians aged 12 to 25 years have misused prescription painkillers,” she said. And with a rise in the cost of painkillers and fewer doctors prescribing them, heroin becomes the drug of choice, fueling the problem.
In response, Mikula said, her department, along with the Bureau of Narcotics and the Department of Public Safety, will be presenting a series of summits around the state, including three in the Delta later this year, to educate the public on the opioid epidemic.
In addition to the summits, the state offers an in-school program, Shatter the Silence, to help remove common stigmas attached to mental illness, and Life Help offers a program called First Aid to educate citizens on how to be a liaison between people in need of mental health treatment and programs available.
Both Mikula and Cole said they are deeply concerned about the current health plan being floated by the U.S. Senate that would ultimately change Medicaid funding to a block grant program to states.
Life Help receives 60 percent of its funding from Medicaid, and any cuts in those funds would affect programs, Cole said.
Mikula said directors at the state level are in contact with Mississippi’s two U.S. senators, Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker, expressing their concerns over the future of Medicaid funding for mental health care.
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
