News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
A severe lack of mental health care services is putting a strain on the communities and existing services present throughout the Upper Cumberland.
Cookeville Vice-Mayor Luke Eldridge said many state-provided services have gone away in recent years due to budget cuts and rising costs. Eldridge said this lack of services is causing many people to go untreated and allowing their issues to worsen over time.
“When they get too far gone without medication and they get too far being untreated, it really gets into a different state of mind,” Eldridge said. “And it’s hard to bring somebody out of unless you had some way, I won’t say mandate, but you had some way to get them to (get), ‘You’re being, you’re not safe for yourself or others. We’re going to, we need to admit you.'”
Cookeville Rescue Mission Executive Director Will Roberts this decline coincides with a rise in homelessness that is flooding the systems that are still in place. Roberts said these people face the same issues as the rest of the public but many are turning to drugs and crime because they have a much higher bar to get over with their mental health issues.
“We try to meet them where they are,” Roberts said. “But the first thing we have to do is get a good diagnosis on them and figure out where they truly are and we’re not set up ourselves to get those (diagnoses) but we have to send them to whatever facilities are available and they’re just few and far between.”
Roberts said about twenty-five percent of the people who come to the rescue mission have moderate to severe mental health issues.
“They don’t have a lot of places to go and so we’re relegated to taking them in,” Roberts said. “We have a program to where we can keep them for up to 21 days. And then we’ve got another program, if we can get a diagnosis on them, we may be able to get them into our other program which is a little more intensive. And we have a process that we work through them with to help them get some spiritual guidance. And we found that that can help immensely with some of their problems. But until they’ve gotten regulated on their medications and set up into a situation, put into a situation where they can really, we can really figure out what’s going on with them, it’s very difficult to help them.”
Eldridge said the best way to pursue a solution is to continue discussing and educating people of all groups about the matter from young school children to the state legislature.
“The state really needs to look at bringing some money into mental health because it affects a third of America,” Eldridge said. “What’s that? Probably forty percent, probably a little higher now. But with everything that’s going on in our culture there’s a lot of issues going untreated. And I think we need to really take a deep dive into what it is. I think there needs to be more regulations on social media.”
Eldridge said there are several facilities that provide short-term mental health care in the area such as Plateau Mental Health and Mental Health Cooperative. Eldridge said Plateau Mental Health also has a crisis stabilization unit that is open 24/7/365 for those in need.
