Mental health services advance as criticism mounts, advocates say

We’re checking boxes, said Carrie Slatton-Hodges, commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, during a visit to the Tulsa World last week.

Slatton-Hodges was referring to a Tulsa mental health plan developed several years ago by a group assembled by the Zarrow Foundation.

One of those boxes, Slatton-Hodges said, is the new, larger Tulsa Behavioral Health Center planned for downtown Tulsa.

It’s a huge lift, she said. We check that. It was a gleam in the eyes of this group five or six years ago. So a lot of that planning and work has been done, and it’s been done by a large group of stakeholders in Tulsa.

Oklahoma is investing hundreds of millions of private, state, local and federal dollars in behavioral health, ranging from early-stage addiction to advanced mental illness, often exacerbated by abuse or drug abuse.

Slatton-Hodges highlighted services launched or expanded statewide in recent years, including:

15 certified community behavioral health clinics providing mental health services to Medicaid patients statewide;

20 emergency recovery and crisis centers, with the goal of establishing at least one in every county with a population of 20,000 or more by the middle of next year;

Implementation of staffed 988 mental health hotline in the state; And

Transportation and telehealth initiatives to improve access.

In Tulsa, Parkside Psychiatric Hospital built a new 114,500 square foot facility and expanded its services, particularly for children. Three urgent and crisis care centers have opened, and over the past three years, the number of adults receiving mental health services has increased by 43% and the number of people seeking treatment for related disorders substance use increased by 37%.

A recently announced grant will provide $9 million for mental health services in Tulsa Public Schools.

However, there are certainly flaws in the system and areas of sometimes open disagreement.

Tulsa is considered one of the few cities of its size without acute mental health care beds in its general hospitals. The David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center is the only county jail in the state that does not participate in a Department of Mental Health competency restoration program for prisoners deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial.

This latter circumstance appears to be largely the result of disagreement over how best to address the backlog of prisoners in Tulsa and other counties who cannot access the legal process because they have been mentally adjudicated incapable.

Until recently, such treatment was available only at the Oklahoma Forensic Center in Vinita, and the waiting list for a bed was about 300 people.

It’s now at 230, Slatton-Hodges said.

The Department of Mental Health began organizing services in county jails about six months ago, she said.

However, some Tulsa County residents apparently consider the program to be far from adequate for the task at hand. They support more inpatient capacity, which Slatton-Hodges said is currently being built. She expects the system to be about 100 beds short of what is needed once the expansion of the Oklahoma Forensic Center, Tulsa Behavioral Health Center and other capital projects are completed. completed over the next few years.

Slatton-Hodges said the situation is largely due to a confluence of factors, including the state eliminating public long-term care facilities for the mentally ill without providing sufficient alternatives and the desire of urban areas to get the mentally ill off the streets.

You see this desire of society to say, “We have to do something with these people.” We need to get them off the streets. We have to do something, Slatton-Hodges said. You no longer have any, you’re not even allowed to take away someone’s civil rights to the extent that that used to happen.

And what I think you see then is saying, Well, let’s do it on the criminal side. (The mentally ill) are accused; they go to the hospital this way. Let’s keep them there for a long time, and that will solve everything. And that doesn’t solve everything. But I think it speaks to some of the evils that you see, she continued.

Specifically, Slatton-Hodges said, “We don’t have a private hospital system in Tulsa that has stepped up to say, ‘Hey, let’s be part of the solution here.’ The state can’t be everything to Tulsa. It’s not what it’s supposed to be.