A great investment

Millions for mental health a wise expenditure

Let’s not get mental illness and mental health mixed up. The terms at times are used in a casual sense as though they describe the same disruptions to one’s thinking, mood and behaviors. We’ll ask for some grace from Northwest Arkansas’ mental health professionals as we attempt basic descriptions that might fall short of their own definitions honed by years of education and experience.

Mental health is a broad term encapsulating how one thinks, feels and acts and its effects on choices. Mental illness involves diagnosable medical conditions that impair normal psychological functioning. At the individual level, failing to address either category can lead to harmful and heartbreaking outcomes.

Beyond that, any state or community that ignores mental health or illness as a matter of public policy does so at its own peril. Certainly, ensuring the availability of interventions reflects a compassionate and humane response to people whose situations can be described as anywhere between struggling and acute suffering.

But there’s also a level of self-interest in delivering robust mental health services. Communities across the state for years have seen their jail populations stressed because detention, rather than treatment, was the most readily available response to someone going through a crisis. That’s a disservice to individuals that also fails to serve the public interests.

It is a rare community that delivers adequate levels of mental health services. Certainly, most have some services available, but accessibility is a different matter. Often, it’s more about crisis management than about prevention. In 2023, the state’s General

Assembly passed Act 512 creating the Arkansas Legislative Study on Mental and Behavioral Health to review the needs across the state and make recommendations for the future.

A 2022 study by lawmakers cited research showing Arkansas incarcerates more individuals with serious mental health issues than it hospitalizes at a rate or 3 to 1. Lawmakers also heard suicide was the second-leading cause of death among middle school, high school and college-age youth in Arkansas.

These are among the many costs of inadequate levels of mental health services.

There is some recent good news. A Feb. 17 decision by the Arkansas Legislative Council allocates $30 million in federal America Rescue Plan funds to fill gaps in mental health and substance abuse services across the state. The office of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the funding is one element of a broader plan to bolster the health continuum of care for people with mental health needs, intellectual disabilities or physical disabilities and those Arkansans who are elderly and aging.

“This larger plan will outline [the Department of Human Services’] initiatives that focus on prevention through crisis to recovery or stability,” the governor’s office said in its news release.

Arkansas can indeed solve, or at least temper, a lot of challenges by increasing capacity for counseling and more intense mental health services. The more such services are available and accessible at the community level, the more impact they can have in strengthening public safety and delivering relief for those affected by mental health difficulties.