Mental health services improving Honberg said, but there is much work to do

Like medical maladies, mental illness has various levels of severity, Ron Honberg said, and those with the latter should not be shunned.

“Even with the most serious mental illnesses, recovery is very possible, and it doesn’t have to be a life sentence,” he told attendees of the NAMI Kansas Annual Conference on Saturday at Webster Conference Center. NAMI stands for National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Honberg, the senior policy adviser at NAMI, in the Washington, D.C., area, oversees the organization’s advocacy agenda and works on legal and criminal justice issues.

From the podium at lunch, he said much is being done to make the mental health treatment system better, from learning better ways to diagnose and treat mental illness earlier, to convincing the public that there are parallels between the medically ill and the mentally ill. Some are intermingled.

Whether you suffer from one form of illness, or a combination, Honberg said, you’re still sick.

Honberg wonders if mental illness is the “number one health crisis of today. I think you could make that argument.”

Making the system better “is a daunting task,” Honberg said, and while there have been improvements, there is much work to do.

“It’s worse when you don’t get treatment in time, and it includes incarceration,” he said.

Methods getting better

Methods are improving since mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, or the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and 18 others in a Tucson, Ariz., suburb in 2011, shed light on mental illness and violence.

Honberg’s presentation included “areas of the greatest challenges and the greatest hope,” such as early identification and intervention and improved integration and coordination of care.

When a patient has a “first episode psychosis,” the mental health is “way behind other areas of health care,” he said, and often intervention waits too long.

Hospitalization or other modes of treatment does not always last long enough, Honberg said.

Half of all cases show symptoms at age 14, Honberg said, but “an accurate diagnosis doesn’t happen for 10 years.”

For many of the mental ailments, the “message conveys hopelessness,” he said. “Forget about college, getting married; you’re gonna take medications for the rest of your life. Forget about living a normal life.”

Programs are being developed now that would propel a patient into care sooner, he said.

Funding needed

Like most issues, solutions require funding.

While proponents push for more dollars, Hunberg suggested making the best of what is available, such as the $350,000 coming to Kansas as part of a federal healthcare program.

Gear up for “intensive outreach” through schools, churches and primary care physicians, to welcome family involvement and “at least low doses of antipsychotic medications,” he said. “The challenge is to get services paid for and paid for effectively. There really needs to be a strong buy-in from Medicaid. Educate insurance companies to pay for these services.

“The first element is intervening as early as possible and make it as engaging as possible.”

Busting the “stigma of psychotic diagnoses” would get patients into treatment at a younger age, he said.

Devising better ways to measure the outcomes of treatments, a deeper understanding of dosing and side-effects of anti-psychotic medications, and tele-mental health systems especially for rural areas, are among the ideas Honberg shared.

Much work goes into training police officers to respond correctly to mentally ill persons, but a response from more than one agency is needed, rather than leaving it up to law enforcement and courts.

“By linking people with the types of (mental health) services they need,” Honberg said, “they would never have ended up incarcerated.”