Construction is just one move community is making toward improving youth mental health services

By Sarah Hall

Editor

Nearly two years after a task force recommended significant increases in youth mental health services in Central New York, the community is making strides in the right direction.

Last month, Upstate Medical University announced that it had received state approval to construct a $3.2 million eight-bed inpatient psychiatric unit for youths aged 13 to 18. Construction on the facility is expected to begin in the spring and it will likely open in early 2019.

“There are more and more kids and teenagers developing mental health problems,” said Dr. Thomas Schwartz, professor and chair of the Department Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “There’s more depression, there’s more suicide, there’s more addiction.”

Meanwhile, budget cuts in the last 15 years have forced families to seek care as far away as Buffalo or Saratoga. Right now Upstate does not provide inpatient services, nor does it currently provide intensive emergency-room-based services for children or adolescents.

“At any given time, there’s 10 to 12 children waiting in the hospital somewhere for a psychiatric bed to open up in Syracuse, at Buffalo, Rochester, Albany, somewhere,” Schwartz said. “What we decided, after kind of looking at these numbers for the last year or so, is if there’s eight to 12 children waiting for beds, why don’t we build the beds?”

The 7,580-square-foot facility will be built on the seventh floor of the main hospital’s Downtown Campus and will also include a family lounge and visiting area. Schwartz said the unit, once it opens next year, will provide short-term inpatient care — “a brief, stabilizing, one-week-or-less stay.”

The addition of the beds was among the primary recommendations of a task force convened in 2015 to identify the weaknesses of Central New York’s mental health care system. The 22-member Youth Mental Health Task Force, led by 129th District Assemblyman William Magnarelli (D-Syracuse) and 24th District Congressman John Katko (R-Camillus), issued its final report in March of last year. Among its 18 total recommendations were open access to services, incentives to providers to enter the field of pediatric psychology, increased focus on early intervention services and improving crisis intervention options.

The recommendations weren’t limited to medical personnel and facilities but applied to the community as a whole, and Schwartz said he’s seen many steps in the right direction.

“I do believe there’s more work being done in some of the school districts. More and more counselors are being employed,” he said. “I think churches, schools, other outpatient clinics, there’s a lot of good things going on in the community.”

Indeed, the Baldwinsville Central School District has made its students’ mental health a focus since March of 2016, when Baker High School sophomore Paige Bird died by suicide. At the start of the 2017-18 school year, the district formed a partnership with Liberty Resources to provide onsite counseling services to students at Ray Middle School, Durgee Junior High School and Baker High School.

The Liverpool Central School District followed suit with an onsite clinic at the Liverpool High School Annex/Morgan Road Elementary complex.

“The goal is to give support all the time — it’s not just for one time. [We’re] bringing in new people to give support on an ongoing basis,” said David Kilcourse, director of pupil and personnel services in Baldwinsville, in December.

Each counselor has a maximum caseload of 30 students, providing individual therapy, family counseling, psychiatric evaluation and medication management, and crisis consultation and intervention. Appointments take place during the school day. Liberty’s services are billed through a family’s health insurance, and Medicaid is accepted.

“We are looking at ways of making mental health services more available,” LCSD Executive Director For Special Education Amy DiVita told Eagle Newspapers last month. “This is an effort for us to meet the mental health needs of our community and our families.”

It’s an effort, Schwartz said, to address mental health issues before they reach a critical stage.

“Ideally, people can get connected to outpatient resources, and if we can get that done right, where we have enough resources, and maybe it doesn’t rise to the needing of the emergency room,” he said.

He said while these steps are important, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

“We still need more things,” he said. “We have a partial hospital. [We need] more outpatient services, group homes, respite homes. We need to build a system in the community and we are doing more, but we can keep going.”

Assemblyman Magnarelli, who helmed the task force that came up with the original recommendations, agreed.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Magnarelli said. “It’s an ongoing battle, but we’re going to keep banging at it.”

He emphasized that in order to better serve people with mental illness, society needs to treat it as an illness.

“It’s important to understand that people with a mental illness have an illness. It’s like a broken leg — it needs to be fixed,” he said. “The biggest thing is to be advocates for mental health. And make sure your electeds understand that. That’s the best thing we can do to move things along.”