UNM mental health reports missing a page on who pays

For years the Albuquerque Metro area has struggled with the collateral damage a broken mental health system brings. Homelessness. Crime. Death. So there are a lot of expectations riding on a new University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center report — “Meeting Challenges, Finding Opportunities: Bernalillo County Behavioral Health Services Assessment.” The bottom line of 29 pages? The area needs more “intermediate- and community-based levels of care” to treat an estimated 13,400 adults with bipolar disorder, 5,700 with schizophrenia, 22,700 with serious mental disorders and 100,000 with any mental illness.

A companion UNM report, “Landscape of Behavioral Health in Albuquerque,” advocates in 21 pages for a cohesive crisis system of care, including intensive day treatment as an alternative to hospitalization, and more formal recovery and rehabilitation programs aligned with supporting school and workplace success. The unanswered question in both is who pays for it. The reports rely heavily on what providers say is needed, and that cuts two ways. On one hand, those folks have a stake in limiting competition in their specific sectors of care. But those providers also know when and where the system fails their clients and others.

The Meeting Challenges report also points out just building clinics won’t solve underlying problems, which include getting people to seek help and getting that help paid for. Not only does New Mexico have “an ethnically diverse population that tends to access treatment less frequently and enter treatment later in the course of a disorder,” it says, but “people with substance use disorders have long suffered from increased stigma, which acts as a barrier to accessing services.”

A coordinated spectrum of mental health treatment services sounds just like what the Metro area needs. As does more education to encourage those in need to seek help and those who house and employ them to work within that spectrum.

But until someone goes beyond saying it needs to be paid for and figures out how to get it paid for, UNM will have just added two more well-intentioned, publicly financed reports to its shelf.