Youth are struggling with mental health. There’s a lot to be stressed about — remnants of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media, growing climate anxiety — and with ongoing workforce shortages, youth psychiatrists are in short supply.
McLean County announced recently it will use a $2.1 million Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) grant to help up to 430 area youth get wraparound services over the next four years.
Major projects include creating a universal screening tool for mental health in schools across school districts, introducing an additional youth psychiatrist in the community, and starting at-home care visits.
Stephanie Barisch, director of therapeutic services at the Center for Youth and Family Solutions (CYFS), said these areas were flagged as “really not coming close to meeting the need” of the community when the agency and others were proposing the grant.
Kevin McCall, director of behavioral health coordination for the county, said they’re hoping to get the ball rolling soon, but there are still kinks to work out.
The program, called System of Care, is based on the Comprehensive Assessment Team (CAT) that was designed in 2020 to assist youth who touched the justice system, said McCall.
“That currently right now is serving about 11 youth with complete wraparound services,” McCall explained about CAT. “That's been pretty successful, and the idea for the application of this [grant] was to supplement those existing efforts, and to even start to grow them.”
McCall said the goal is to help around 70 youth in the first year of the SAMHSA grant and 120 youth each year after.
The county, the Regional Office of Education #17, The Baby Fold, the McLean County Center for Human Services (MCCHS) and the Center for Youth and Family Solutions are all working on the grant. Each is playing a unique role.
Universal screening tool
Trisha Malott, behavioral health coordinator for the Regional Office of Education, said they’re focused on school screening tools. These are assessment tools that help identify youth who may have mental health needs in schools.
“What we're looking to do is to bring the districts together to one, identify one common universal tool that we're all going to collectively agree to utilize, and also identify what that process and metric is to screen,” she said.
Each district currently determines its own screening tool and when that tool should be used.
“While they're likely going to be giving very similar information, it's not the same and it's not consistent,” she said.
Having a universal tool also could mean connecting with youth at earlier stages. The way the system is currently set up, Malott said it’s not until “somebody really needs help that they tend to be identified. “
Getting this done also means improving connections to resources and care for students. This could include social workers and outside agencies. Malott said strengthening the overall infrastructure of referrals and care is a goal of the grant.
Added services in the community
McLean County Center for Human Services will be hiring a psychiatric advanced practice nurse. The agency's current psychiatrists all cater to adults and adolescents, so it need someone who specializes in “littles,” CEO Joan Hartman said.
McCall said “it’s very difficult to add those positions or to find the funding for it,” so the grant should be helpful.
Kathleen Bush at the Baby Fold said the agency is going to provide at-home services for youth and families, including caregiver education opportunities and potentially therapy.
“It just seems like a good continuation of care, going right into the home and modeling the parenting suggestions that we have and supporting the parent and trying to figure out what are the needs of their particular child, and then meeting them where they're at,” Bush said.
The Baby Fold does this now with adoptive and foster families, so this would be an extension of services to outside groups.
“We've been in the homes of McLean County families for a very long time,” said Bush, who stressed that plans are evolving, and the Baby Fold’s role may change a lot based on what the grant participants determine youth need.
No youth crisis care
Not included in the grant are services related to youth crisis care. This does not mean there aren’t already services in the community. CYFS has three programs that cater to youth in crisis.
However, no agency in the county offers 24/7 mental health urgent care to youth. Behavioral Health Urgent Care is operated by MCCHS and serves adults 18 and older.
A youth equivalent to the program has been requested since it was known as the Triage Center, but there hasn’t been a move toward that yet.
Hartman said at MCCHS they “really feel strongly” about separating youth and adult mental health crisis centers, as children require different services than adults.
“We know it's a need, it's not something that we would feel comfortable with just expanding the current programming," she said. "I think that it really does require us — and by us, I mean, like us, children and adolescent providers — to come together and really look at what is best practice.”
Barisch of CYFS explained there also is red tape. Any center planning to hold children for longer than 24 hours has to be licensed as residential, complicating matters.
She added there also are advantages to programs like the at-home care proposed in the System of Care grant that make it more appealing than a crisis center.
The System of Care grant also will likely shift the mental health needs of youth, she added. It’s about preventative measures.
“Hopefully we can bring down the number of youth and families actually going into those crisis situations in the first place,” she said.
Hartman of MCCHS said the collaboration through System of Care puts the county in a good position to continue coordinating services going forward — for example, if the need for a BHUC youth equivalent re-emerges.
“I think that the communication lines that we'll have through this System of Care grant will really help enable those conversations to happen on a regular basis,” she said.
McCall said he hopes they can get services started in the next few months.
