Impact of Mental Health Budget Cuts

There is still no predicting at this point how the budget cuts will impact mental health services. The most recent cut by Governor Paterson is specifically identified for state operations. That is of great concern. However, our overarching issue continues to be cuts to the local assistance budget which greatly impacts many community mental health services and programs. When the legislature comes back next week, we should get a better read as to the impact of any local assistance cuts.

We continue to maintain that in these economic times, cuts to the mental health budget are bad public policy. More and more people are seeking mental health services because of the recession, unemployment, bankruptcy and foreclosure. Many of these individuals will end up in the public system because they will be unable to afford the cost of living. The strength of community mental health is the ability to provide quality services for a wide cross section of people at a great savings to the state.

To cut funding in the community at the same time as you have major increases in the number of individuals seeking mental health services is a ‘perfect storm’ that could well have dire consequences for thousands of individuals with psychiatric disabilities in New York.

We continue to urge Governor Paterson to limit cuts in funding for mental health services.

Attached is a letter that we had published in yesterday’s Albany Times Union. We also have attached an op-ed piece in the Atlanta Journal Constitution that talks firsthand about the national impact of mental health budget cuts.

Reconsider cuts to the mental health budget
Times Union, Letter to the Editor

First published: Sunday, August 10, 2008

Gov. David Paterson deserves a great deal of credit for his handling of the state's fiscal crisis, especially in regard to his immediate actions and candor.

However, when it comes to cutting the state's mental health budget, we urge his administration to reconsider. In bad economic times, more and more individuals seek mental health services. It would be detrimental to thousands of New Yorkers if, at the same time as more people are desperately seeking mental health services, those core services were being cut in the budget.

GLENN LIEBMAN
Albany
gliebman@mhanys.org
The writer is CEO of the Mental Health Association in New York State.

On July 22, in Taunton, Mass., Carlene Balderrama, a wife and mother despondent over her family's financial woes, including the imminent foreclosure of the family home, shot herself to death.

A few days later on CNN, a young woman in Southern California professed thoughts of suicide as she contemplated the loss of her home in foreclosure. She is undoubtedly not alone in what has come to be described as "debt depression," a term encapsulating the rising tide of negative mental health consequences of such hardships among those struggling with job loss, home foreclosure, rising food and gas prices, and declining wages.

What Americans are experiencing economically is clearly not "all in our heads," or, as former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, a John McCain adviser, recently put it, a "mental recession." But the increasing difficulty of the struggle to make ends meet and avoid homelessness is taking a correspondingly harsh toll on the mental health of our citizens. As an attorney whose work takes me all over Georgia, I have witnessed on too many occasions the mental suffering of individuals and families undergoing the kind of severe financial instability that is afflicting our entire nation today. Indeed, Americans by the millions are coping with high levels of anxiety, fear and often a sense of personal failure that make it difficult to take productive steps toward economic recovery.

Moreover, when people lose their jobs or homes, or otherwise face a significant downturn in their finances, the loss of health care coverage may prevent them from seeking mental health care services in order to cope with the psychological fallout from these economic hardships. They may lose hope and refuse to reach out to any source of help. This may well have been the case with Balderrama, whose suicide caught her husband, son and loved ones unawares, because she told no one of her despair. Short of self-harm, that inward-turning psychological response to financial hardship can be isolating and prevent one from taking steps to ameliorate financial problems. Simply put: If you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning because of depression, you can't very easily look for a job or seek help avoiding foreclosure.

Fortunately, financial hardship need not be an impediment to obtaining appropriate mental health services. Increasingly, low-cost or free mental health services are being offered by nonprofit organizations like Atlanta-based Metropolitan Counseling Services. I became involved with MCS in part because I believe MCS and organizations like it can play a critical role in a community's efforts to recover from economic difficulties by addressing the mental health impact of such hardship. Indeed, counseling or psychotherapy can help one transcend despair and rebuild that healthy sense of perspective and self-esteem that is the foundation for effective planning and action in all spheres of life. It could have helped Balderrama see alternatives to suicide as she struggled to cope with her family's financial problems.

In the coming year, we as a nation will be debating how best to repair our health care infrastructure and provide care to all our citizens, regardless of income. In that process, we must not overlook the urgent necessity of providing easily available and affordable mental health care services.