Every three years, Parkland Health and Dallas County Health Services releases a Health Needs Assessment – kind of a checkup on how the community’s doing.
In the latest report, behavioral health and mental wellness topped the list of concerns countywide.
Sam Baker talks about why with Kurtis Young. He’s Senior Director of Social Work for Behavioral Health Services at Parkland Health.
Kurtis Young: I think part of it is the state of our world right now. Things are more expensive. It's harder to kind of make ends meet financially.
Politics of the world right now are not exactly something that are easy to kind to deal with sometimes.
As well as like, how do we access care? People who've never accessed care before, they don't know where to go a lot of times.
Baker: Are these increases the result solely of social and economic factors, or is it just people being more aware of behavioral health and mental wellness?
Young: I think that's yet to be kind of determined.
You know, there are some people who are predisposed. They know that mental health has a genetic link. So, if your folks or your grandparents had a mental health condition, then you are more likely to suffer from one as well. It's very common.
Many people suffer from depression, anxiety, things like that. So it's not uncommon to have one of those conditions. And they're very treatable.
But to know exactly what's happening in there is individual. It's gonna depend on you going to a doctor or a psychiatrist or somebody to assess and kind of figure out what's kind of happening with you.
Baker Is there now less of a stigma about addressing mental wellness and behavioral health problems?
Young: I think it's still hard for some folks to kind of even admit that they can't overcome it themselves sometimes. And I think that that's okay. I think, that it's better though.
I think especially since COVID, we've really seen a turn on the stigma issue. And that from the sense that fewer and fewer people are not getting care because of it, that they're actually going to get care in spite of maybe what they've thought in the past.
Baker: What's being done now to address any of this, particularly what has Dallas County done or what is it doing now?
Young: So over the last several years, Parkland, for one, has really expanded their adult and pediatric mental health services within our primary care clinics. We have 16 community-oriented primary care clinics throughout Dallas County.
We've also included an expansion of a referral hub so that no matter where you go at Parkland, if there's a mental health referral that happens, that we're going to get you to a place that's maybe closer to home if that's a priority for you or someplace that has a specialty that you need. So in that referral hub can really help to identify that with you as part of your care.
There's also been an expansion to adolescent services with the RightCare team. So we're currently in a pilot program where we're now going out and seeing adolescents ages 10 to 17 where before it was just an adult program.
They've also started the Paths to Recovery Clinic. This is a substance use clinic, because one of the outcomes that was identified in the Community Health Needs Assessment was a 99% increase in overdoses in the last three years, which is very, very significant and was a very concerning statistic.
So one of items being the Path to Recovery Substance Use Bridge Clinic is helping to connect people right away from, whether they're in the E-R or somewhere else in the community that they can even come in and very short notice and we can get them connected to care that day.
Baker: Can Dallas County Health Services and or Parkland address this issue alone?
Young: I would say that this is a community issue, and we are trying to partner with other folks, including different community behavior health clinics, the Behavioral Health Authority and things like that, as well as the health department where we can.
So I think that even churches and schools and families, you know, can partner together to kind of help each other out and knowing where to go or how to help address the problem.
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