Manatee County Commission Concerned about Cost of Cuts to Mentally Ill

BRADENTON – Budget cutbacks that could rip away some 38 percent of the funding for Manatee Glens and other programs that serve the drug addicted, mentally retarded and and mentally ill will be devastating, county commissioners were warned Tuesday by representatives of several agencies serving that population .

Some 3,300 clients of those programs now served in Manatee County would be released from treatment and find themselves with "no psychiatrists, no prescriptions, no counseling," commission chair Carol Whitmore, who is a nurse, told the rest of the board.

"This will be very scary for the people of Manatee County if these people don't have their medications," she said. The 3,300 are part of the 12,000 clients served by county and state-funded programs.

"This will be disastrous for our community," said Commissioner John Chappie. "It's just devastating."

There is reason for such concern. Abrupt transition from a forced or voluntary regimen of psychiatric medications to life without them has been a reported factor in much criminal behavior, even crimes as catastrophic as shooting sprees. Researchers have found numerous instances where discontinued medications preceded a deadly rampage by just a matter of weeks.

Commissioner Joe McClash says the budget situation may also have created an unconstitutional "unfunded mandate," in which the state requires certain actions by the counties or cities, but does not make funding available to perform them. Help to the mentally ill in Manatee County may be one of those, he said.

County Attorney T.N. Williams promised to investigate the issues posed by such mandates in the Florida constitution.

"You don't count the dollars by the hurt," said McClash. "It's cheap politics."

Treatment of the mentally ill spares the county far more money than what would be expended in jailing them, protecting them from themselves and protecting others from them, he indicated, while the obligation to care for them is impossible without adequate state funding.

McClash spoke as the Board of Commissioners was approving a resolution to be sent to the state legislature urging the House to restore huge cuts in funding for the mentally ill and drug-addicted.

"It's wrong to fund rowing teams while you ignore the poorest part of the population," McClash said – a reference to the Harvard University rowing team that will soon make a new Manatee County facility its home away from Boston's Charles River.

The resolution was unanimously approved.