Sept. Chamber Forum addresses mental health, criminal justice reform

Since receiving a report commissioned by the Chamber from the New York-based Vera Institute in 2015, efforts in the areas of mental health and substance use, major contributing factors to prison overcrowding, have taken on more and more significance.

The Oklahoma City community has rallied around these issues and continues to discover the many ways that mental health and substance use challenges have impacted our community.

“We're seeing people and organizations convening in really unprecedented ways to address these issues,” said Roy Williams, Chamber president & CEO. “Just a few weeks ago, the Oklahoma City Council voted unanimously to support the inclusion of two new mental health crisis centers, a new restoration center, temporary crisis housing and a diversion hub as part of the MAPS 4 package that will appear on ballots in on December 10.”

At a recent Chamber Forum, a panel comprised of Carrie Blumert, county commissioner for Oklahoma County District One; Debby Hampton, president and CEO of United Way of Central Oklahoma; and Terri White, commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services discussed various ways that the issues are being addressed.

“This is the biggest public health issue facing our state,” said White. “It affects one out of every four of us. One out of every four of our family members, our friends, our co-workers, members of our community, men and women who've served our country. Twenty one percent of adults in Oklahoma will struggle with severe mental illness each year and 10 to 12 percent will struggle with addiction each year. Between 700,000 and 900,000 Oklahomans each year. That's what one out of every four looks like.”

White said this is a result of decades of underfunding, decades of stigma around diseases of the brain, not understanding it and not covering it the same way that other diseases are covered under insurance.

“I cannot tell you how many calls I get from friends who have great insurance, whose child is struggling and they cannot get the help that they need,” she said. “We have to make sure people have access to care. When people can get into care in Oklahoma they can and will recover and they can lead full and productive lives.”

The United Way of Central Oklahoma’s Hampton said her organization has committed major financial resources to the effort.

 “Last year, United Way put about 1.3 million dollars into mental health, behavioral health programs,” she said. “This year, we'll put another 1.3 million of our campaign dollars into those services.”

And that’s a change from years past.

When Hampton started at United Way just over nine years ago, the main needs in Central Oklahoma and specifically Oklahoma City were always basic needs. Food, shelter and clothing. Now, mental health has risen into that top three.

“We're in a crisis situation and we need to really deal with it,” Hampton added. “It's our future workforce, it impacts our economy and how we treat our neighbors.”

County Commissioner Carrie Blumert made criminal justice reform one of her main issues during her election campaign. She said that almost every voter, regardless of whether they followed the issue in the media, was aware that the Oklahoma County Jail had serious problems.

“The Vera Institute and the chamber kind of started this big movement toward making big changes at our jail,” Blumert said. “One of the biggest decisions that was made this summer that doesn't necessarily have to do directly with mental health but our jail trust. The three commissioners voted to create a jail trust authority.”

The trust comprises nine members and they recently voted to hire a full-time jail administrator.

“It will be extremely important that that jail administrator understands mental illness and addiction and understands how to structure a jail to better serve people with mental illness,” noted Blumert.

Oklahoma City has a unique way of investing in its future, through the Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS) plans, and the MAPS 4 package, to be voted on Dec. 10., contains several mental health, substance abuse and criminal justice projects.  

“We're excited that a crisis center, restoration center and transitional housing units will all be included,” White said. “When we started meeting with different groups this summer and earlier this spring to ask them if MAPS could pay for something related to mental illness and addiction, what should it look like? What do you need as a mental health provider, as a law enforcement officer, as a staff member in the jail? The themes that we heard over and over and over were, we need more safe places to take people who are in crisis that is not the jail.”

And the efforts in Oklahoma City go even farther, as can be seen by the efforts if the Oklahoma City Compact, a partnership between the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber, the United Way, Oklahoma City Public Schools, the city of Oklahoma City and the Oklahoma City Schools Foundation.

“Adults with mental illness and addiction start as kids with untreated mental illness and addiction,” said White. “The key partners in the compact came up with four different pillars they wanted to address. The second pillar they wanted to address was mental health (the first was literacy) which we are calling our Embrace OKC initiative.”

White said that if you think of mental health as a triangle, most kids hopefully being at the bottom of that triangle, doing well and needing just preventive services or education, then the top of the triangle is where kids are really struggling and need treatment.

“What we found in Oklahoma City was that our triangle unfortunately is inverted,” said White. “We have a lot of kids in crisis, we have a lot of kids who are struggling with psychological distress, we have kids who are struggling with substance abuse and we have a high rate of kids who are struggling with antisocial behavior. We also found that the Oklahoma City Public Schools students one had a belief in the moral order, that if you do the right thing and engage in the right thing there will be positive consequences. And they also believe the school may be the safest place they knew. Which means, if we tie our interventions and our prevention and our treatment to the schools, that's where they're going to feel safe and they're going to engage.”

Oklahoma City residents get to invest in these programs to support mental health and justice reform as part of the MAPS 4 campaign.

“On Dec. 10, residents can vote YES on these 16 projects and really do some great things for our community,” Williams said. “This is a really a comprehensive package and we really do need the community to step up and support this.”