The Michigan House Oversight Committee is drafting a report on the state’s behavioral health system after weeks of testimony from providers and families
Many point to a lack of psychiatric beds as driving people with severe mental illness toward emergency departments and county jails
With the state’s budget still being hashed out, a formal conclusion remains forthcoming
LANSING — Michigan residents who need treatment for mental illness are being forced to rely on hospital emergency departments and even the criminal justice system because of a persistent shortage of psychiatric beds and insufficient staffing in treatment facilities, state legislators have concluded.
“What we really found was that because of the lack of service, folks who need mental health assistance and help are winding up in other systems throughout the state, utilizing those resources and then still not getting the help they need,” Rep. Mathew Bierlein, R-Vassar, said Tuesday at a meeting of the House Oversight Committee.
Bierlein chairs the Subcommittee on Public Health and Food Security, which received several hours of testimony this summer from various health care providers, advocates and families about deficiencies in a system that is meant to serve the more than 1.7 million Michiganders with a mental health condition.
On Tuesday, he discussed the subcommittee’s preliminary findings. A formal report on the status of Michigan’s behavioral health system remains in the works as state lawmakers focus their attention on budgeting ahead of the Labor Day holiday.
Michigan’s National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) — Michigan estimates more than 450,000 people in the state have a severe mental illness.
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Many who testified described the difficulty in finding hospital placement at the onset of a severe mental health episode and the geographic challenges facing rural communities in accessing nearby care.
Some private institutions, Bierlein told the committee, lack the resources to handle more intense cases.
“They don’t necessarily have the staff or the training or the bed space available for the highest need folks,” he said. “Those folks would be the candidates for a state bed and that’s where the lack of state events really comes into play.”
Citing a standard set by the Treatment Advocacy Center, a Virginia-based nonprofit that advocates for reforms in treating people with severe mental illness, Bierlein said Michigan falls far below the 50-bed minimum per 100,000 people necessary to adequately provide care, describing the Upper Peninsula as a “bed desert.”
“The state actually has about five beds per 100,000 residents,” Bierlein said. “You get north of Bay City and that is a particularly underserved area.”
At a subcommittee hearing in July, a Grand Traverse County official testified that 38 of the 169 people incarcerated in the county were “severely and persistently mentally ill.” The suspect accused of stabbing 11 individuals at a Walmart in Garfield Township, who remains in the county’s jail, was recently declared mentally incompetent to stand trial.
Beds specifically designated for minors are “underserved” in northern Michigan, Bierlein said, adding that providers are unable to convert their use for adults during seasonal capacity strains.
In response to the review, Rep. Jay DeBoyer, the Republican chair of the oversight committee, said his conversations with health care providers and law enforcement provide a similar conclusion on the state of the system.
“The mental health treatment that’s available in the state of Michigan, is landing in the county jails and it’s landing in the emergency rooms,” DeBoyer told the group. “I think it’s horribly underserved.”
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