AP: Virginia's Youngkin aims to bolster mental health care, part of national focus after the pandemic
John Clair, the police chief of a small Appalachian town in southwest Virginia, spends his days consumed by a growing problem: the frequency with which his officers are tapped to detain, transport and wait in hospitals with people in the throes of a mental health crisis.
Officers from Clair's 21-member Marion Police Department crisscross the state to deliver patients for court-ordered treatment, sometimes only to discover the hospital where they were sent has no available beds. Patients end up boarding in waiting rooms or emergency rooms, sometimes for days on end, while under the supervision of Clair's officers.
It's a problem for law enforcement agencies around Virginia, one that advocates, attorneys and leaders like Clair say ties up policing resources and contributes to poor patient outcomes. In the past five years, these types of transports have become the largest single category of case the Marion department handles.
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"We are against the wall," said Clair, an Army veteran and former lay pastor who sometimes shuttles patients himself, and did so last month on a nearly 15-hour round trip to a coastal city on the other side of the state.
The problem underscores a widely held consensus that Virginia's mental health care system is in urgent need of reform, due to what Gov. Glenn Youngkin's administration says is an overreliance on hospitalization at a time of growing need.
About a year ago, Youngkin, a Republican, rolled out an ambitious initiative that aims to transform the way psychiatric care is delivered by creating a system that allows people to get the treatment they need without delay, in their own community and not necessarily in the confines of a hospital, easing the burden on both patients and law enforcement.
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Youngkin's emphasis on mental health developed during his 2021 campaign, when person after person — from doctors to local officials to police — pleaded with him to make it a priority, according to John Littel, the cabinet secretary overseeing the Virginia initiative.
"It was just so clear that people were really struggling," Littel said.
Youngkin has since won bipartisan support for his "Right Help, Right Now" initiative and praise from advocates, though some worry about the pace at which things are moving. The governor — whose press office says the initiative is exceeding key milestones — cannot seek a second consecutive term and leaves office in two years.
The initiative's wide-ranging goals include building up the behavioral health care workforce and working to stem the tide of overdose deaths, which claimed the lives of an average of seven Virginians a day in 2022. Youngkin has signed dozens of related bills into law and has secured hundreds of millions in new funding, with more proposed.
The "foundational" part of the plan, as Littel describes it, is creating a system that delivers same-day help to individuals in crisis, which should also relieve some of the burden on police departments like Clair's that are charged with transporting most patients a court deems a risk to themselves or others.
Youngkin's administration hopes to build up that continuum of care by increasing the number of mobile crisis teams with clinicians to respond to mental health emergencies and creating more short-term stabilization centers for patients to avoid the need to take them hours away from their homes for care.
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