A bipartisan bill in the Legislature looks to address gaps in Wisconsin’s mental health resources, particularly in rural areas, where trauma-informed and mental health emergency centers are lacking.
The bill proposes spending $10 million in state funds to create regional crisis urgent care and observation facilities to provide short-term care to people experiencing a mental health emergency. Currently, they are taken to the state’s mental health hospital near Oshkosh, oftentimes hours away from home and family.
“These centers will be located closer to home, especially for residents in western Wisconsin who need support and services during a mental health crisis,” bill co-author Rep. Clint Moses, R-Menomonie, said in a statement. “This has been a long time coming and much needed for our state.”
Children’s mental health is a very prevalent issue right now, with one in six children struggling with mental disorders.
The proposed urgent care and observation facilities, dubbed Crisis Now centers, are based on a model of providing three levels of care: providing crisis phone lines for those needing someone to talk to; having mobile crisis response teams ready to help individuals in need; and building facilities to provide individuals in need a safe place to go to.
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Senate Bill 462 aims to address the third need by creating a network of regional facilities to provide individuals experiencing a crisis an opportunity to recover “in a safe, calming space closer to home,” according to a memo seeking co-sponsors for the bill.
Individuals experiencing a psychiatric emergency in Wisconsin are typically met by police officers, who are often the first to respond to such an incident. From there, the individual is often placed in the back of a police car and taken to the Winnebago Mental Health Institute near Oshkosh.
In addition to being disruptive for individuals in crisis, transporting them to the state-run institute is time-consuming for police officers, pulling them away from their communities and increasing overtime costs.
“It is a terrible process on so many different fronts,” bill co-author Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, told reporters Wednesday.
The bill requires that any Crisis Now centers be located at least 100 miles from the Oshkosh facility. The bill’s co-authors said the state Department of Health Services and the Legislature’s budget committee would jointly determine where the facilities would be located. DHS officials have said the $10 million set aside in the state’s 2023-25 biennial budget could support one to two facilities.
“We get one of these centers up and going, and I think it’s going to show how great it’s going to work, and I think it’s something we can really build on,” Moses said.
According to DHS, a crisis urgent care and observation facility is a treatment facility that admits an individual “to prevent, de-escalate, or treat the individual’s mental health or substance use disorder and includes the necessary structure and staff to support the individual’s needs relating to the mental health or substance use disorder.”
The bill has been supported by almost a dozen organizations, including the Badger State Sheriffs’ Association, National Alliance on Mental Illness Wisconsin and Wisconsin Counties Association.
“I think this really starts at the basic foundation of human needs,” Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said. “This provides those who are going through crisis to have the opportunity to have their trauma be reduced.”
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The bill requires that any Crisis Now centers be located at least 100 miles from the Oshkosh facility.
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