When Jennifer, Jake and Jordan Shepard died in a rural Streator fire recently, the ripples were felt throughout the community.
After authorities said the deaths were the result of a murder-suicide and the mother had been under a doctor's care for an undisclosed mental illness, friends, neighbors and strangers were in shock and a state of collective grief.
According to North Central Behavioral Health Services President Don Miskowiec, this is not unusual.
"Everybody feels the effects of mental health problems in the community," Miskowiec told The Times.
Between 2009 and 2011, Illinois cut mental health funding by $113.7 million, or 15.1 percent of its budget, making it the ninth-highest cut state in the country, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
North Central provides mental health and substance abuse services to seven counties, including La Salle, and has 11 service centers, including in La Salle, Ottawa and Streator. The provider has lost $2 million in funding during the last two years. Miskowiec said that figure is significant because one in four people have a mental health or substance use disorder.
The funding cuts have directly impacted people who were paying on a sliding-fee scale either because they didn't make enough money or they didn't have insurance or a job that pays for insurance.
"What happens is we always provide emergency services. Ongoing counseling/therapy we can't do. We do refer to other places when we can, but it's hard to find places that offer sliding fee scales," Miskowiec said. "We serve an average caseload of 2,500 clients per month. We used to serve about 3,000 per month. (This is) primarily due to cuts in funding. We're probably serving about 2,000 fewer clients per year. We used to serve 6,500 to 7,000 (unique) clients per year."
"Myself, I think it's a public health crisis," Miskowiec said. "Many people are being cut out of services, denied services. Mental health services are an essential part of health care."
Miskowiec said when people don't receive needed mental health services, emergency room or jail visits can result. He added that often mental illnesses contribute to physical health problems, all of which can ultimately be more expensive than the services themselves.
"We're seeing a lot of people, but myself and our staff, we still spend a lot of sleepless nights worrying," he said.
State Rep. Frank Mautino, D-Spring Valley, whom Miskowiec said has been supportive of the provider's needs despite the state's budgetary crisis, said overall funding cuts notwithstanding, Human Services, which includes funding for Medicaid, developmental disabilities and mental illness, still make up 57 percent of the state's appropriations of revenue. The second is education with 23 percent.
Mautino said the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee decided to place what funding there is for mental health into community health services, like North Central, and to cut back on state-supported mental health hospitals.
"Her priority was to get more money to the community providers," Mautino said. "They're the front-line providers. They provide the direct services."
Neither man is optimistic about the near future for funding improvements.
"I think the trend is not good at all," Miskowiec said. "I think we're going to struggle with this for years to come."
Mautino said it will be at least three to four years before the state's budget crisis improves. However, he said Human Services would continue to receive 57 percent of all revenue.
"It will remain a priority," he said. "That's the format we adopted."
# As posted by Daily-Journal.com; report by Jerrilyn Zavada, 07/29/2011
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