Local officials anxious about proposed cuts to mental health funds

April 03--Of the 45 people in Lee County Jail on Friday, almost 20 percent were being treated for mental illnesses. In Whiteside County, 30 percent of the inmates were.

As the state continues to cut funding for mental health services -- closing down state-run mental health centers and slicing money for community health providers -- local jails and prisons have become the holding cells for Illinois' mentally ill.

With Gov. Bruce Rauner's proposal to further reduce the amount of state money put toward behavioral health services, the number of people housed in jails with mental illnesses will continue to swell, authorities say.

Rauner's budget plan, if approved, would cut more than $98 million in state funding from the Division of Mental Health in the Department of Human Services.

With more than $1 million of those dollars filling out Sinnissippi Centers' budget, the cuts would mean dire consequences for the Sauk Valley's largest provider of mental health and addiction services.

Patrick Phelan, president and CEO of Sinnissippi Centers, estimates that would mean cutting services for about 4,000 adults and children who get medication prescriptions through Sinnissippi every year, and that an additional 600 patients would have to go without counseling for substance abuse and mental health issues.

"On the one hand, this budget proposes to virtually destroy the existing infrastructure, while on the other it vows to expand treatment options for individuals struggling with re-entry from correctional systems," Phelan said. "The irony here is that by dismantling the community behavioral health systems, our jails and prisons will become the default service provider for many seriously ill individuals.

"This is a very expensive and ineffective plan to provide treatment to those in need."

Larry Prindaville, chief administrative officer at Sinnissippi Centers, has worked there for 44 years.

"There have been hundreds of millions of dollars cut from mental health and substance abuse treatment support in the state of Illinois in the last 10 to 15 years," he said. "Therefore, this is especially harmful because it goes directly to the core -- limiting even the most essential services, which are pretty much all that's funded at this point in time."

From 2009 to 2012, states cut $1.6 billion for mental health services, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Illinois alone cut $187 million -- nearly a third of its funding for mental health services. Those cuts led to the closure of two of the already small number of state-run mental health centers in Illinois: Tinley Park and Singer.

Those closures limited the options for the state's poor and mentally ill who couldn't afford treatment or didn't have access to it, and with funding being cut from the remaining community mental health centers, the options for people suffering from mental illnesses dwindle. Many patients resort to self-medicating with alcohol or by purchasing illegal drugs, experts say.

"We know that a lot of people who need outpatient services are in hospitals and-or jail because of a lack of services," Prindaville said. "And our hospitals and our jails are going to be serving an ever increasing number of those folks."

When community members can't afford the services at Sinnissippi, sometimes they turn to local health clinics. The Whiteside County Health Clinic recently was awarded a grant to expand its behavioral health department. Beth Fiorini, public health administrator for the county, said that with the likelihood of services being limited through Sinnissippi, it's good timing.

"We have increased our capacity quite a bit, so, hopefully, we'll be able to take in some of the patients," Fiorini said. "But the other problem is that ... we have therapy sessions, but some people need something more intensive than what we can do. I think that's the real crisis here. We can do the, 'See you every 2 weeks; let's talk about this.' But we can't do the intensive treatment, so there would be patients that are outside of our scope.

"Behavioral health is one of the highest needs in the area, and reducing that money is not good at all."

And it's not just funding for treatment that would be lost. The health department, which receives state public health funding, could lose what Fiorini says is one of its most vital services: Preventive treatment options for disadvantaged families.

In the county's family case management program, social workers and nurses work in the home with women with young children to provide a support system that ensures the mothers and children are receiving proper nutrition, that they're getting immunizations, and more.

"If you reduce the treatment programs like Sinnissippi, and you reduce the preventative programs like family health management, it's a double-edged sword," Fiorini said.

According to a 2006 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, from 1998 to 2005, the number of people with mental illnesses being held in prisons and jails jumped from 283,800 to 1.26 million nationwide.

Whiteside County Sheriff Kelly Wilhelmi and Lee County Sheriff John Simonton see that effect firsthand.

"Actually what's amazing is, instead of cutting, they need to take that amount and multiply it times 10, then add that to the [mental health budget]," Wilhelmi said. "The problem that we have, and this is the issue: Everyone seems to blame the instrument. Anytime someone is shot with a gun, it's all mental health issues that cause all of these problems."

Wilhelmi said that the jail now houses a man with severe mental health issues who needs to be in a more clinical-type setting, but getting him there will take 6 to 8 months.

"The federal and state government has failed all of us," Wilhelmi said. "I would love to see them open more institutions and get more help for everybody, and with the economy, that even compounds the mental health issues. It all trickles down, and we're the bottom line here."

In Lee County, Sheriff Simonton was recently told that one inmate who is waiting for a bed at Elgin, one of the few remaining state-run mental health institutions, won't likely receive one until August.

Until then, his name will languish on a waiting list, and the man will remain in county jail.

"The correctional officers are doing the best they can," Simonton said. "But we're not a treatment facility. We're not psychiatrists; we're not psychologists; we're certainly not a long-term treatment facility.

"If it's already delayed this much with the current funding, you can imagine what it's going to be like with the cut in funding."

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