Human Services

Adult Mental Health Grants

Statewide Outcome(s):

Adult Mental Health Grants supports the following statewide outcome(s).

Minnesotans are healthy.

Strong and stable families and communities.

Context:

Mental illness strikes all ages, all economic levels, and all races. For people with mental illness, it disrupts learning and educational plans for the future, job security and income. One out of every four persons live with a mental health problem. Mental illness also affects families – spouses, parents, siblings, grandparents and children. People living with a mental illness are at significant risk for being homeless. According to a 2009 Wilder Research Homeless study, 55 percent of homeless adults surveyed had a serious mental illness. Having a mental illness can sometimes be fatal. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death. In Minnesota, eleven out of every 100,000 adults take their own lives each year.

National and state statistics demonstrate that individuals with mental illness have higher mortality rates than others due to untreated or undertreated physical health issues. Seeking a primary care physician for annual physical health screenings can result in earlier and less-costly treatment of common chronic illnesses.

Adult mental health services provide the supports people need at crucial times in their lives. Grant funding is used to increase the number of Minnesotans served in their homes and communities rather than in institutions and to improve life expectancy for people with a serious mental illness.

Strategies:

Provide a statewide network of crisis response services. Mobile crisis teams can provide outreach to persons and intervene quickly in community neighborhoods when people experience a mental health crisis. Crisis beds can also help people stay closer to home and avoid costly hospital stays. Crisis response services save lives by provided support and intervention that allows people to remain in the community and avoid the additional life disruption that a hospital stay entails. They also allow law enforcement professionals to carry on with their other duties of protecting the citizenry and they frequently team with law enforcement officers to lessen the time that law enforcement officers must spend intervening in mental health crisis, transporting individuals or waiting for the individual at a hospital. Crisis response services also can allow emergency room doctors to focus on treating physical ailments rather than focusing on persons with mental health issues.

Co-locate medical and mental health services wherever possible. Since persons with mental illness are at significant risk of diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic health conditions, it is important to link physical health services with mental health services. Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) is a service-delivery model that provides comprehensive, locally based treatment to people with mental illnesses. ACT provides highly individualized services directly to consumers through multidisciplinary teams. Staff are available around-the-clock to deliver the majority of treatment, rehabilitation, and support services required by each client to live in the community. Most recently, ACT teams have focused on improving the physical health of individuals with mental illness through better linkages with primary care clinics. In Minnesota, efforts to reduce the number of persons with mental illness who die 25 years earlier than the general population focus on the following two strategies.

·         Improved integration of physical and mental health care.

·         Providing every ACT client with an annual physical focusing on health and wellness indicators, including body mass index, tobacco and alcohol use, blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, and blood sugar. Any indicator failing outside the “normal/desirable” range will be followed up by the team.

Provide access to crisis housing funds to ensure people don't lose their housing during their hospital stay. A short term crisis housing retention fund helps people with to 90 days of financial assistance for mortgage, rent, and utilizes for adults with very chronic, severe mental illness. This assistance is used to help the person to retain their home while they are getting needed mental health treatment and using their income to pay for treatment. This is the only program in the state that provides this service.

Results:

Crisis Response Services Results - Adult residents in every county in the state can access some form of Crisis Response Services.

Assertive Community Treatment Results - An important performance measure is the degree to which the services succeed in keeping the client well and living in the community rather than requiring hospitalization or institutional care.

Crisis Housing Fund Results - Crisis Housing Funds served persons with severe, chronic long-term mental illness. It allows individuals to retain their housing while they received needed mental health treatment.

Performance Measures Notes:

1.     Previous measures Calendar Year 2010 and Current measures CY 2011.

2.     Previous measures Calendar Year 2009 and Current measures CY 2010. The measure looks at a readmission to any psychiatric inpatient care unit (either State Operated or Community) within six months of discharge from a psychiatric inpatient care unit.

3.     Previous measures Inpatient days per client for the year before starting program and current measures inpatient days per client the year after starting the program. The department goal is to reduce the need for hospitalization and keep persons served in the community.

4.     Previous measures State Fiscal Year 2008 and Current measures State Fiscal Year 2011 of the percentage of individuals receiving adult rehabilitative mental health services (Assertive Community Treatment, Adult Rehabilitative Mental Health Services, or Intensive Community Recovery Services) who are screened for the possibility of substance use. Recovery from mental illness can be more difficult when an individual has undiagnosed and/or untreated substance abuse issues.