Unite in mental illness fight

As I write this, the Des Moines metro area is grieving the loss of two middle school children who committed suicide and the death of a veteran who had requested psychological assistance for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and had been told there would be a several week wait before he could see a counselor.

Approximately 123,000 (4.1 percent) Iowans live with a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression.

Iowa should have a least 1,500 psychiatric beds for the severely mentally ill; we only have 750. In the past five years, we have closed 80 psychiatric beds, leaving only 10 dedicated psychiatric beds in Des Moines for all of Iowa's veterans. There are approximately 80,000 youth in Iowa with severe emotional disorders; in other words, children who have mental illness.

The statistics are numbing:

' 50 percent of students over age 14 who have a mental illness will drop out of school

' 70 percent of youth in the juvenile justice systems have a mental illness

' 90 percent of those who die by suicide have a mental illness

' Only 20 percent of children with mental illness are identified and receive services

Iowa is 44th in the nation for number of psychiatric providers per person. We are short of not only psychiatrists, but psychiatric nurses, psychiatric nurse practitioners and other psychiatric providers. The care of psychiatric patients will not get better until the workforce problem is taken care of.

We deplore the fact that with the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, we have traded treatment in mental health institutions for warehousing the mentally ill in prisons. There are nearly 3,000 mentally ill inmates in Iowa's prisons.

In 2013, Iowa recorded the largest number of suicides in our state's history - 445. There is a major crisis of care in Iowa.

It is imperative that we, in Iowa, as a community which seeks excellence in all aspects of health - physical, spiritual, emotional and mental - put our best efforts into improving our mental health system. Treatment must be available, timely, humane and affordable. Therapists and counselors must be present in sufficient numbers so that those who are experiencing a mental health crisis are able to receive prompt attention. Psychiatric beds must be abundant to provide safe places for those who need inpatient care. Insurance and other funding streams need to be adequate to provide needed services for those with mental illness.

We applaud the workers who provide essential care to those in need. We applaud the redesign efforts of the state to move toward community based (regional) mental health services. We encourage those who seek to provide excellent services. We call upon all Iowans to support financially, spiritually and emotionally the people suffering from the variety of conditions we call mental illness.

May our witness be helpful to legislators as we all seek to do our part to care for those who need us the most. Let us unite in facing this crisis together and rededicate ourselves to excellence of care.

' Julius C. Trimble is Resident Bishop with the Iowa Conference of The United Methodist Church. Comments: bishop@iaumc.org; (515) 974-8902