Kansas Makes a Good Response to a Bad Grade

By Kate Lee, Contributing Writer

F — that’s the grade Kansas received from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in 2006 when they graded the state’s public adult mental health treatment options.

What had gone so wrong in a state that was the birthplace of modern psychiatry? Where the world renowned Menninger Clinic was created in Topeka in 1919? And what could be done to fix it?

Things have changed a lot since 1919. The Menninger Clinic moved to Houston in 2003, and private facilities are closing, reducing the number of patient beds. Kansas’ population of 2.7 million people is served by only three state hospitals, in Larned, Osawatomie and Kansas City, with just 300 beds between them.

It’s not an adequate amount of beds, says Rick Cagan, executive director of NAMI in Kansas. It’s even less so when you consider there are 1,800 mentally ill inmates in the Kansas criminal justice system that could be treated at those facilities, and about 900 of them have been diagnosed as being seriously mentally ill. Cagan believes that if better services existed, there might be fewer inmates.

And the lack of beds is only one part of the problem--other services have been dramatically reduced in recent years because of severe state budget issues.

“The cost of (neglecting) our mental health system is our criminal justice system,” Cagan says. “It’s been said that the largest mental health facility in the country is the Los Angeles County Jail.”

In Kansas, mental health professionals and the state took NAMI’s report to heart. The Governor's Mental Health Services Planning Council’s Transformation Subcommittee, comprised of consumers and family members, advocacy groups and representatives from the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, was expected to deliver a draft set of recommendations to the full Council last month.

“We looked at the report and found a lot of interesting things,” says Wes Cole, Council chairman. “There were several we thought we could be proactive about. There were some very good things to be learned from the [NAMI] report. We gave it some time, set feelings aside, and looked at the criteria. I am pleased with the [draft] report.”

Although the draft report isn’t public, Cole says that the Housing and Homeless Subcommittee had some inventive ideas regarding the housing shortage, and that the Services Delivery Subcommittee was looking specifically at the problem of the mentally ill who are trapped in the criminal justice system.

Cagan says that Kansas seems to be “holding steady, if not doing a little better,” these days. He says it remains to be seen how the shift for responsibility for Medicaid mental health benefits to Kansas Health Solutions ( a not-for-profit organization that oversees the mental health provider network)works out. On a positive note, during the 2006 Legislative session, money was put toward the state hospitals, specifically, the Osawatomie facility for a renovation project. This may show that lawmakers are “responding to what we’ve been saying for awhile.”

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