After their son committed suicide, Joe and Jennifer Skelley created an organization focused on raising awareness about mental health and talking openly about it. The organization has already made progress in its first year.
Mental health and disability services throughout a nine-county area in East Central Iowa will get a $5.47 million boost after a regional board on Thursday approved spending down much of its end-of-budget year surplus.
The Leadership for Five Seasons Class of 2023 recently presented checks to Foundation 2 Crisis Services and Tanager to support community mental health services.
Among them: new nursing home moratorium and ‘baby box’ bill
Karen Smith, like most moms, would do anything for her kids. That includes walking almost 300 miles across the state of Iowa, twice.
The board that governs regional mental health and disability services advocated for spending down a nearly $9.2 million surplus before the end of the budget year in June by boosting support for underfunded services within its nine-county area.
The Guardian Training Institute is an Iowa City based nonprofit that offers trauma and mental health training and programs for firefighters, police officers and first responders. The nonprofit has just begun offering the training at private businesses.
A pilot civil specialty court will start next month in Johnson County to help individuals who were involuntarily committed be successful on their own in the community. The court sessions will ensure participants continue their meds, treatment and receive other needed supports.
Major medical groups in the United States -- including the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics — say gender-affirming care is safe and encourage it as a treatment for gender dysphoria, which is when people feel like they are a different gender than their birth gender.
Video visits are an increasingly common way for residents of small-town nursing homes to receive mental health care.
The regional board that manages mental health funding passed a budget allocating $2.9 million for the Linn and Johnson County access centers after supervisors in those counties pushed for sufficient funding.
The Linn County Juvenile Detention Center is seeking funding through the Mental Health/Disability Services of the East Central Region in order to continue its partnership with Tanager Place to provide mental health services to incarcerated juveniles.
As the East Central Mental Health Region prepares to vote soon on Linn and Johnson County access center budgets, Director Erin Foster hopes the region sees value in “paying to be prepared and paying to have access available.”
The mental health access centers in Linn and Johnson counties would be funded below their requests under a proposed budget for fiscal 2024. County officials and providers warned this would result in reduced services, if not closure of the facilities.
Iowa House lawmakers advanced legislation supporters say could provide a financial lifeline to Iowa’s small, rural hospitals that face closure.
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