TTUHSC Responds to Mental Health Needs in West Texas

By Kara Bishop

Based on Mental Health America’s state rankings, Texas sits at 43rd nationally — 25th in adult, 46th in youth, 4th in prevalence and 50th in access to care. These numbers may illustrate a cyclical pattern of stigma toward mental illness over time. While most health professionals view mental illness on the same level as diabetes and cancer, it’s only been recently described as such. Decades of stigma toward mental illness is hard to break through; though, there are some positive changes happening. One is the open discussion of such an illness.

In an article published in 2016, a writer for Texas Monthly said, “Mental illness happens, and it doesn’t indicate a moral failing on the part of the person dealing with it. We’d benefit as a society, generally, if that understanding were more deeply embedded into how we treat people who live with or require treatment for mental health troubles.”

Susan Calloway, PhD, FNP-BC, director of the Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) Program in the School of Nursing, experienced the stigma associated with mental illness firsthand.

“After I graduated with my family nurse practitioner degree, I moved back to my hometown in Kansas, and was working in primary care,” she said. “I had known these people personally for a long time, so they would confide in me regarding mental health issues they were experiencing. But they refused to see anyone but me for treatment even though I wasn’t a specialist in mental health at the time.”

Calloway began working on her PhD, with a focus on what she called “barriers to help-seeking for psychological distress.” She wanted to know what was preventing people from seeking help. “People were committing suicide and their family members had no idea the risk was there,” she said.

If someone with a mental illness does manage to jump the stigma hurdle, they are left with an even higher mountain to climb: access to care. The shortage of mental health care professionals is a nationwide crisis as evidenced by the following:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports about 111 million people live in “mental health professional shortage” areas (HPSAs).
A 2016 report by the Health Resources and Service Administration projected the supply of workers in selected behavioral health professions to be approximately 250,000 workers short of the projected demand in 2025.
A 2017 report form the physician search firm Merritt Hawkins states, “The shortage of psychiatrists is an escalating crisis … of more severity than shortages faced in virtually any other specialty.”
According to the journal, Health Affairs, two-thirds of primary care physicians report difficulty referring patients for mental health care, twice the number reported for any other specialty.
As of December 2017, Texas housed a total number of 425 HPSAs — population of 9.6 million people — with 44 percent of the need met, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The number of practitioners needed to remove the HPSA designation is 432.

TTUHSC is taking these numbers seriously and have rolled out programs and clinics — and the TWITR Project (to read the story on TWITR, click here) — to help address this shortage.