At the end of March, Congresswoman Marianne Buttention announced two new Office of Mental Health (OMH) initiatives to combat the ongoing youth mental health crisis in New York State and Oneida County.
The initiative will utilize $30 million in capital funding to focus on developing a psychiatric residential treatment facility by purchasing new properties, constructing new facilities and renovating existing facilities. Additionally, OMH announced funding for 37 Flexible Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams across the state.
Luis Ramirez is a licensed clinical social worker. A year ago, he opened his own clinic, Rising Potential Counseling, in Utica. He says clinicians like me face many challenges, the biggest one being money.
“Each clinician is required to complete up to 12 hours of continuing education credits each year for a total of 36 credits over three years for each individual before certification for licensure,” Ramirez said. For example, the cost of the training we attend ranges from $400 to his $1,300. ”
Ramirez said she recently became certified to diagnose autism because the need for autism is so high in the county.
“It cost me nearly $3,000 for each person to go through the training just to get the certification and one of the autism treatment modalities (ADRs),” Ramirez said.
He says that's because the need for mental health services outweighs the number of providers who have to be placed on waiting lists.
“How do we know who is suicidal and who needs mental services? Unfortunately, we don't have a clinician right now because we don't have a doctor on the case,” Ramirez said.
The Department of Mental Health will create more facilities for psychiatric residential treatment and proactive community treatment to serve people with mental health needs who have visited emergency rooms or had run-ins with the law. They're trying to close that gap by giving teams more money. Execution.
“And clearly we need it,” Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente said. These are all positive and good things to deal with this problem. We still have a long wait, you know, over six months. And families can't wait that long to get treatment or be admitted to some type of facility. ”
Picente says the state needs to take a closer look at the numbers.
““Releasing people on medication is not the solution. We need more treatment facilities and more inpatient and outpatient facilities to accommodate this,” Picente said.
To that end, Ramirez says he would like to see more funding from the national budget for private businesses like his.
“If that particular clinician doesn’t get reimbursed, I can’t pay them,” Ramirez said. Out of 70 people, this person will start getting 30 and then the waiting list will start to go down again and people who need mental health will have access to mental health. ”
