A huge thank you to all of you whocame out on Saturday September 24th for our annual Run/Walk at the Forest Preserve in Wheaton. It proved to be our best ever, raising over $45,000, mostly through pledges. From all of the families and consumers that we serve we thank you.

The first week of October was Mental Health Awareness week. To honor it NAMI DuPage added Depression Screening to our website, along with the unveiling of our new Advocacy Toolkit. The toolkit gives lots of great information on past and current legislation; it provides many links to sites such as Involuntary Commitment, Children’s Mental Health, Medicaid, Supported Employment and much more.

State Hospital Closures

With the many cuts to mental health services that we have experienced over the past couple of years there is now a proposal to eliminate some state hospital beds and to close others. The proposal is being put before the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability (COGFA) this month.

The proposal for the DMH restructuring is for Chester, Singer and Tinley Park to close. Alton will be maximum security and a small amount of extended care; McFarland, medium security, forensic and civil extended care with no civil acute care. Chicago Read all civil extended care with no acute admissions; Choate and Madden will have no changes. Now here is where DuPage County will be most impacted: Elgin is slated to add medium security forensic and civil extended care and lose their 75 acute civil beds.

How does this impact DuPage County? With Elgin possibly losing 75 civil beds those individuals who are severely ill and need extended in-patient treatment (up to three months) will no longer have that option. All of our community hospitals are already stretched to the limit and spend countless hours trying to find beds for these patients; they just do not have the resources to treat many of the patients that are currently being served by the state system. There are many individuals residing in DuPage County that are unfunded yet do not qualify for Medicaid. Our county jail already has waiting lists for inmates who clearly need treatment, not incarceration for these beds. Many families go through a great deal of heartache and pain before taking the difficult steps to have a loved one involuntarily committed. With this proposal they are likely to go through that process only to find that there are no beds available or that they have to have their family members sent hundreds of miles away, which does nothing to aid the recovery process. We know that as well as treatment and medication, family understanding and support are crucial to a person’s continued recovery.

The Mental Health Summit has reached out to Governor Quinn in an effort to make the legislators understand the impact that these proposals will have throughout Illinois. In the mid 1950’s there were 35,000 State psychiatric beds, today there are just 1,300; with these cuts, that number would be cut drastically again. While Elgin currently only has 75 acute care beds those beds serve many hundreds of acute cases where stays of up to three months were deemed necessary by their doctors.

If these beds go where do those patients go? I can tell you that many will end up in homeless shelters, on the street, in jails and in our prisons. If these were beds for cancer patients or heart patients this discussion would not even be taking place.

At the time of writing this I have just been told that there is another proposal to close the in-patient behavioral health unit of 18 beds at Elmhurst hospital. This is the hospital that has just spent millions of dollars on a state-of-the-art hospital expansion and plans to expand their cancer unit.

We all, as a community, need to understand and recognize that mental illnesses are as much a physical illness as diabetes, cancer and heart disease. One in four Americans is affected by mental illness in one way or another. Mental illness is not a choice, we need to begin to treat the mentally ill with the same amount of human compassion and diligence to research as we do all other illnesses.

What can we do? We need to contact the Governor and our State legislators and tell them that these closures cannot go forward without a firm plan in place to service the many thousands that will be impacted. It costs far more in dollars and resources, police time and first responders to keep recycling our mentally ill through our community hospital’s ERs, jails and prisons. Our legislators need to know that, far from cutting costs, their decisions are escalating them. Please go to our Advocacy Toolkit at www.namidupage.org to contact your legislator.

On a final note, as our front page shows, all of the NAMI DuPage board and staff are becoming certified in Mental Health First Aid; the next training planed will be for our volunteers. This training will ensure that all those connected to NAMI DuPage in a leadership role will be certified as Mental Health First Responders.

As always we are here to serve and support you.

Thank you,

Angela Adkins - Executive Director