Missouri legislator Wallingford leads mental health subcommittee, vows legislation

State Rep. Wayne Wallingford of Cape Girardeau (R-147) recently finishing chairing more than 16 hours of testimony on mental health treatment options in the State of Missouri.

Wallingford, the dean of Southeast Missouri's legislative delegation in Jefferson City, said the panel heard its most recent testimony Nov. 10.

What Wallingford heard was overwhelming, he said.

"It was like drinking out of a fire hose," opined Wallingford, chairman of the newly created six-person Subcommittee on Mental Health Policy Research

"We got a late start because I was out for two months due to COVID, but we heard from 34 people in four-hour hearings held on four separate days," explained the veteran legislator, who has a degree in health care management and whose wife is a registered nurse.

Lack of beds

"I think one individual testified that back in the 1980s, when he went into the (mental health) field, there were about 8,000 beds available in the state. Now, he said, there are only 2,000," he said.

Wallingford said as a result of testimony to his subcommittee, he would "definitely" introduce legislation aimed at "diverting" future mentally ill people away from hospital emergency rooms and the criminal justice system.

"(The mentally ill) end up in emergency rooms and in prisons at the highest institutional cost with the most ineffective results. Just because someone is incarcerated doesn't mean mental health problems go away."

The lawmaker, who was elected to the Missouri House last year after serving eight years in the state senate, also trotted out some statistics gleaned from the subcommittee's work.

• One in five people in jail or in prison has a severe mental illness.
• The mentally ill die, on average, 25 years before those in the general prison population.
• Those with serious mental illness are 10 times more likely to inhabit a jail cell than a hospital bed.

Corroboration

Cape Girardeau County Sheriff Ruth Ann Dickerson is among those in law enforcement lamenting state cuts in mental health funding.

In a June 11, 2020, story published in the Southeast Missourian, Dickerson offered an anecdotal case to illustrate the problem.

"We have a gentleman right now who belongs in a treatment center but (the state) can't find him a bed," Dickerson said.

"A mentally ill person might have committed a petty crime and law enforcement takes him to jail or perhaps to the hospital ER to wait for a bed to open up. This takes the police away from their normal duties of public safety and enforcing the laws," Wallingford said.

Local progress

The $33 million Southeast- HEALTH Behavioral Hospital on South Silver Springs Road in Cape Girardeau opened in March with a 102-bed capacity.

The new hospital's stated mission is to provide inpatient and outpatient mental health care to adults, adolescents and geriatric patients.