New mental health task force chair says group will focus on access to crisis services
The new State College-Centre County mental health task force held its first meeting last month, and on Tuesday the group’s chairwoman, longtime community leader Billie Willits, laid out its timeline and goals.
“The focus of the task force is on the crisis service that’s available in the mental health system and so we’re really focusing on folks who are in crisis,” she said.
Though some individuals may have mental health issues but are not in crisis, Willits said the task force wants to ensure anyone who gets to that level “has the kind of service they need to be successful as they come out of a crisis.”
Since its first meeting, Willits said the task force is finding that people in the community aren’t aware of mental health services already available to them. She wants the task force to work to streamline the language and avenues used to talk about mental health and crisis services.
According to a press release from the borough, the task force will examine the entire “continuum of care” for mental health crisis services, which includes mobile crisis services, delegate crisis services like Can Help, involuntary commitment warrant procedures (302 warrants), police officers’ role in responding to mental health calls and 302 warrant procedures, emergency department procedures and post-emergency department services.
Willits declined to identify the 29 people serving on the task force, and the borough said the information will not be released to the public at this time. But she did say they represent a “broad section” of the community.
In a previous release, the borough said the task force would be made up representatives from many different entities including Mount Nittany Medical Center, State College Area School District, Penn State, Pennsylvania State Police and emergency medical services.
The mental health task force formed, in part, in response to the fatal police shooting of 29-year-old Osaze Osagie, a State College resident with autism and schizophrenia, in March. While Willits said “there were other reasons” as well, Osagie’s death “was probably the stimulus” and “that case will be one that the task force will look at because that ended up being a crisis.”
“When you think about mental health, as complex as it is, it’s difficult to know all the pieces, and people enter the process at different places, and so what we’re trying to look at is all of the process. Where are there strengths, where are there opportunities for improvement?” Willits said.
The task force, she said, will divide its time into three phases: a “mapping” phase that involves information gathering and interviews with community members about various crisis services, an “analytical” phase of looking at the results of mapping and a “writing” phase where the task force will synthesize the information into a report with results, the process used and recommendations.
She wouldn’t speculate on the possible recommendations of the task force, but said they would likely focus on local policies and practices and could extend to practices on the state level and beyond.
Interviews with community members will be conducted by teams of task force members who will look at what services are available and how effectively they’re serving the community, she said. The task force hopes to finish the mapping phase by January, wrap up analytical some time in the spring and issue the report later in the spring of 2020.
“A lot of the input from the community will be through the interview process,” Willits said. “After we finish the interviews and we do that mapping then we’ll go back to the community again and say, ‘This is what we see, this is what we’ve got, what else is there from your perspective?’ And get that input then.”
Though specifics haven’t been set, Willits said the task force anticipates meeting with the public several times to share preliminary results, ask questions and cull more testimony. Those meetings will likely take place in State College, Bellefonte and possibly other parts of the county, she said.
Willits, a 30-year resident of State College, came to the community from a small city in Iowa and has worked at various higher education institutions in Iowa, Massachusetts, Ohio and at Penn State in human resources, leadership development, strategic planning, affirmative action and as a faculty member. She has also served as board chair of Skills of Central Pennsylvania and the Skills Foundation, president of AAUW State College and is a current member of the Human Resource Committee of Centre Volunteers in Medicine.
She found her “passion” for working with people with mental illness while growing up in Iowa, when she helped run a half-day day care for physically and cognitively impaired children. Willits saw how children were able to play and interact and their parents were able to rest from caretaking with just a short community-run program.
“I have been long a believer that when we talk about health and well-being, we’ve got to quit talking about physical health and mental health. They are one. They are the health of the individual. And there’s so much that can go on about the health of an individual that we are missing,” Willits said.
For Willits, getting the public on the same page, increasing access to services and advocating solutions to any system deficiencies are her top goals for the task force.
“I am hoping that if there are services that we need, that we will be able to make recommendations with enough strong advocacy behind them to be convincing,” she said. “Once we figure out terminologies that these groups along the continuum of crisis services use ... I’ll be curious to see how the public reacts. Because if we all have a fairly common definition ... then it will help us communicate much more efficiently in the community.”
This story was originally published October 9, 2019 at 7:47 AM.