Articles & NewsFebruary 25, 2009
Rural communities respond to lack of mental health care Last fall, roughly 123 mental health clients in Dayton and 58 mental health clients in Fernley, had to find mental health care in Fallon, Carson City or Silver Springs when the State Rural Mental Health offices there were abruptly shut due to budget cuts. This left a growing void in mental health care. In urban areas, Nevadans are able to seek mental health care through private agencies and are able to receive prescriptions for medications with their family doctors more easily. But Lyon County has a health professional shortage of astounding dimensions. For instance, Lyon County has one licensed and full-time equivalent primary care physician for every 6,804 residents, while in urban areas of Nevada there is one primary care physician to every 1,405 residents. Patients have great difficulty finding a way to receive a prescriptions for medication for a mental illness when there are 21 licensed physicians to every 100,000 residents in Lyon compared to the 247 licensed physicians in Carson City. Nevada already has the second highest suicide rate in the country, with the elder-suicide rate at more than double the national rate according to UNR's Sandford Center. In addition, lack of mental health care will affect the most vulnerable in our population, and interfere with reasonable access to effective, preventative care such as medications and treatment, crisis care, and counseling. Although it may seem as though cutting the Rural Mental Health Budget saves money, society as a whole will pay for these cuts soon, as mental health is increasingly treated in emergency rooms and intervention comes in the form of police response to crises that develop when there is a lack of mental health care. Through on-going dialog at monthly Healthy Communities Coalition meetings, residents from throughout Lyon County agreed that it is unethical to remove essential services like State Rural Mental Health without a transition plan in place with local providers and government in rural areas where no other alternatives exist. The solutions rural residents have been suggesting, beyond the obvious hope that mental health care should remain in rural Nevada, is that state administrators should work with local providers and government to contract mental health services and to work with Medicaid to allow for licensed clinical social workers, licensed marriage and family therapists, and clinical professional counselors to bill Medicaid. This would allow some flexibility for services in rural areas where it is difficult to find medical supervision of services. Together, with flexibility and creativity, social services, churches, schools, law enforcement, medical providers and nonprofits are seeking local solutions to the devastating reduction of rural mental health care. Lyon County schools, human services, churches, Lyon Council on Drugs, and Community Chest have all offered free or minimal cost for office space to provide local access for mental hearth care providers. Together these organizations can keep mental health services available throughout rural Nevada. Legislators may not understand the impact of this issue on rural Nevada unless they get rural citizen input on this issue. It's easy to contact your legislators by phone or e-mail -- don't delay offering them your concerns and insights. Quest Lakes lives in Silver City and is an active member of her community and the county. |
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