By Francie Broderick
Imagine being a mother so afraid of her son—a 19-year-old with undiagnosed and untreated schizophrenia—that she locks herself in her bedroom at night. Imagine knowing that your mother with bipolar disorder is living in a car. Or that your 84-year-old aunt has to move into a nursing home and is worried sick about what will happen to her 50-year-old mentally ill son who has always lived with her. Imagine that your bright, handsome, funny brother is homeless, mentally ill and abusing drugs to cope with the voices constantly in his head.
These are the kind of calls and heartbreaking stories we hear every day at the mental health agency where I work—and they are just the tip of the iceberg.
For the past 30 years, dedicated people in our community have been working to build a system able to respond to these calls. We have never been able to adequately address the need, but we have built the infrastructure that is the basis of a good system. And we have seen miracles happen. We have seen lives reclaimed and made whole. Now, Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt’s proposed budget threatens to rip to shreds even this fragile and inadequate safety net.
Blunt’s budget would eliminate $93 million from the state Department of Mental Health, which would, in turn, trigger the loss of additional federal matching funds. Tens of thousands of very sick and disabled people would lose services. Provider agencies would close and the mental health system we have painstakingly pieced together over the decades would be in total collapse. In the greater St. Louis area alone, more than 10,000 people would lose life-saving services.
The irony of this proposal is that, in addition to the human suffering and even death that would result, it won’t save money. All of the research nationally and within our own state programs confirms that providing community-based services for people with serious psychiatric disorders will result in savings in emergency room use, hospital costs and prison beds. What kind of healthcare system dictates that a person become so severely ill that they must go into a hospital to be treated and stabilized and then discharged into a community with no treatment, until they decline so badly that they are a danger to themselves or others and go back to the hospital or prison?
Private, nonprofit mental health agencies like my own are already struggling with raising private dollars to support the work we do. It has been difficult, but it has been just the kind of private-public partnership the governor extols. Agencies like my own are efficient and accountable with the public dollar—not because a Donald Trump is waiting to shout, “You’re fired!” but because lives depend on it.
I am clinging to the belief that Blunt was ill-advised when he prepared his budget and that he will have the good sense and good grace to reverse this proposal. If not, this whole community will pay a price, and it will be higher and sadder than he could possibly imagine.
Francie Broderick lives in University City. She is a mother of three and director of Places for People, a nonprofit mental health center. Her husband is a nurse in the emergency room of a psychiatric hospital.
