Rep. Moody aims for results in mental health

Nov. 27--AUSTIN -- Another study of mental-health services in Texas is not what the state needs, the vice chairman of a House committee that is preparing to work on the issue said this week.

Instead, the state needs concrete policies -- including legislation -- that will fill gaps and better coordinate the services that are available, Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, said this week.

"Every indication I've seen is that this is not going to be a committee that's going to research the issue," Moody said on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, named Moody as vice chairman of the House Select Committee on Mental Health. Another House member known as a low-key consensus builder, Four Price, R-Amarillo, was named chairman of the committee.

It will do its work during the interim before the 85th Legislative Session convenes in January 2017.

Moody, who serves on House committees involving criminal jurisprudence and public safety, said it's hard to overstate the importance of improving mental-health care in Texas. Untreated problems can lead to substance abuse, poor work performance, unemployment, homelessness, domestic strife and even mass shootings.

In times of crisis, sufferers often end up in the criminal-justice system.

"Unfortunately, county jails are one of the biggest providers of mental-health care in the state," Moody said, adding that providing such care in jails and emergency rooms are two of the least-efficient, most-expensive methods of doing so.

The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reported that in 2013, Texas ranked near the bottom of states when it comes to mental-health funding.

Moody said the Legislature over the past few sessions has improved funding for mental health and must continue to do so.

"Unfortunately, it's not just an issue of adding more dollars," Moody said.

He cited an opinion column by Tom Luce, executive director of the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute for Texas. Among his other arguments, Luce said Texas needs to change the focus of its mental-health services.

"Right now the state aligns most of its resources to handle mental health once it has reached the crisis stage, the most expensive stage of mental illness," Luce wrote in the Dallas Morning News. "Effective programs exist that can address needs earlier and prevent expensive trips to jails or emergency rooms."

About $2 billion a year is spent on mental-health and substance-abuse visits to Texas emergency rooms and jails, Luce wrote.

Moody said those resources would be better spent deploying care to keep people facing difficulty from reaching crisis. And an important way of doing that, he said, is by surveying community resources and coordinating them to meet each region's unique needs.

In El Paso, that means care for a large Hispanic population as well as care for veterans, active-duty soldiers and others, Moody said.

The committee hasn't scheduled its first hearing, but Moody said he's been contacted by about five El Paso organizations that want to tell him about what they do and what they need.

"We'll have the opportunity to take our story and tell it to the committee," Moody said.

Marty Schladen can be reached at 512-479-6696; mschladen@gannett.com; @martyschladen on Twitter.

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