DA: Unmet Mental Health Care Impacts All

Upper Cumberland communities are being forced to deal with various issues brought about by the lack of proper mental health care facilities in Tennessee.

District Attorney General Bryant Dunaway said the absence of long-term placement services is causing many people to enter the criminal justice system when they really need mental health care. Dunaway said the rest of the community is also negatively affected as people with severe mental health issues can go out in public and cause disturbances through actions like indecent exposure.

“Police are asked to respond to those circumstances and find themselves in a predicament,” Dunaway said. “They recognize that this person is just mentally ill, but the only immediate recourse the officer may have is to take them into custody and take them to the jail because they’re causing a disturbance in a public setting.”

Tennessee Tech Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program Coordinator Mark Loftis said the situation creates extreme hardship for people in the Upper Cumberland who need emergent psychiatric placement because they have to go Nashville, Knoxville, or Chattanooga to receive care. Loftis said one realistic solution is to utilize the currently empty regional hospital buildings that exist throughout the region.

“If someone could find a way to bring together resources to reopen some of these as psychiatric facilities and, you know, the brick and mortar is there,” Loftis said. “That’s one of the most expensive parts of providing services. They’re there and just creatively, you know, funding these things.”

Loftis said they also need to find more ways to get people to work in the counseling and mental health fields as there are too few professionals to properly address the issue.

“There are ways of doing it,” Loftis said. “But just even the fact of, you know in the Upper Cumberland area, we have very little availability for patients to have access to psychiatrists. We have nurse practitioners, and they’re very good but there again, most of them are overwhelmed with the number of referrals they’re trying to see.”

Loftis said the state government recently started a scholarship program for people pursuing a master’s in counseling that requires recipients to work for state agency for two years in an underserved area.

“There are a few geriatric psychiatric beds available in the area at some of the local hospitals, but they’re very few in number, and that’s reserved only for geriatric patients,” Loftis said. “And it gets even much worse when you begin exploring the availability, accessibility for emergency placement beds for children, adolescents. They’re zero in the entire upper Cumberland area, and it’s a hardship for families.”

Dunaway said they have the legal ability to send people to be evaluated in certain circumstances but that does not address the root of the problem.

“They’re maybe placed on their appropriate medications and then they’re released just in a few days and they’re back in the community and then get off their medications and then they’re back behaving in a way that is disturbing to a community,” Dunaway said. “And so that cycle continues because there is no long-term placement.”

Dunaway said the state used to have long-term mental health hospitals that were closed for various reasons including mistreatment of patients and abuses of the system.

“That’s really kind of swung the problem all the way to the other side of things and created a different problem,” Dunaway said.