Joe, 55, suffers from schizophrenia. He lives in a Baton Rouge retirement and assisted living community, sees a psychiatrist and a social worker every six months and takes three medications that help him sleep.
For 30 years, he has made regular visits to the Alliance House Drop-In Center on North 12th Street. When asked what he would do if the center didn’t exist, Joe, whose full name is being withheld to protect his privacy, looks down at his lap.
“I don’t know,” he tells Business Report in the cover story of the special 2017 Trends in Health Care issue. “I have friends here. I have things to do. It keeps me stable.”
The center hosts members with serious mental illnesses—mostly schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder or bipolar disorder—each weekday morning until midafternoon.
Members learn about their illnesses, how to manage their emotions, and how to advocate for themselves with benefit and health care providers. Up to two dozen people might drop in on a typical day, and about 200 members will use the center over the course of a year.
Program manager Katherine Anders says their members seem to be sicker since Earl K. Long Medical Center closed in 2013. The hospital was an important referral point for low-income residents with mental health problems, program director Brenda Philson adds, and now it’s harder for them to figure out what services are available.
The drop-in center is one piece of what ideally would be an unbroken network of care. Melissa Silva, executive director of the Mental Health Association for Greater Baton Rouge, which oversees the drop-in center, says the region already lacks enough mental health services to meet the need, and state budget cuts continue to eat away at the resources that do exist.
“When you cut mental health services, you might save a dollar, but it’s going to cost you $12 down the road for the hospitalizations or the prison stays,” says Jenny Ridge, the association’s development director.
Silva is dealing with a recent $50,000 cut in state funding. The association does private fundraising, but mental health isn’t the most popular charity, and last year’s flood will make raising money even more difficult. She says 93 cents of every dollar the association receives goes directly into services, so there’s not much fat to cut.
Meanwhile, law enforcement officers, asked to be de facto case workers for those who fall through the cracks, often are left with two options: The emergency room or parish prison.
For several decades, there was a national push to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill. In
“We work diligently to get the resources these people need,” says Denise Dugas, executive director of mental and behavioral health at Our Lady of the Lake. “We’ll hold onto those people in our inpatient units. It creates a bottleneck.”
Meanwhile, the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison typically houses about 1,600 inmates, and about 20% to 30% suffer from mental illness, says Lt. Col. Dennis Grimes, the prison’s warden. For the past two years, he had two social workers provided by Capital Area Human Services to work with incoming prisoners, but that contract was a casualty of city-parish budget cuts.
Often, when the cops are called to arrest someone with a mental illness who has committed a minor crime, the person who made the call doesn’t actually want the other person to go to jail, Grimes says.
“There’s nowhere else to take them except to jail,” he adds. “When people come to prison and they’re mentally ill, we’re tasked with something that we don’t have the capability to do.” Grimes has started
Read the full cover story, and be sure to check out other stories included in the 2017 Trends in Health Care. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
