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Fully 70 to 90 percent of individuals with mental disorders improve with appropriate treatment, including counseling and medication, enabling individuals to live healthier, more productive lives.
As our community grows, so does the need for mental health care, and service providers are struggling to keep up with demand. Our community’s non-profits and governmental agencies identify three areas as major barriers to helping individuals and families with treatable mental health needs:
* lack of capacity for diagnosis and treatment
* limited financial resources
* the pervasive stigma surrounding mental illness
The Austin-Travis County Mental Health Mental Retardation Center (ATCMHMR) addresses our community’s most serious mental health issues, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and crisis intervention. The Austin State Hospital provides residential treatment for acute psychiatric disorders. Both are limited by state funding constraints. Austin is the largest city its size that does not have its own treatment facility.
With your help, local non-profit agencies can increase public awareness and make a wider variety of mental health services more accessible to all of our citizens.
Early intervention is critical to enabling children and youth to achieve their full potential. One in five children has a diagnosable emotional disorder, and one in 10 has a serious disorder, yet only one-third will receive appropriate care.
A number of agencies serve as resources for Central Texas children and their families on a sliding fee scale. Austin Child Guidance Center provides out-patient psychiatric evaluations, psychological assessments, parenting classes, and individual, group and family therapy for children under 18. Austin Child Guidance Center serves more than 2,400 children and their family members annually.
The Capital Area Mental Health Center provides low-cost psychotherapy to individuals and families experiencing depression, bipolar, anxiety, trauma, abuse, addictions, grief/loss and relationship issues. Serving more than 600 clients each year, the agency must turn away clients due to lack of space and personnel.
The Samaritan Counseling Center is an interfaith counseling center offering specialized faith-based counseling to approximately 2,000 individuals, couples, families and seniors each year. The Samaritan Center’s HOPE for HEROES program offers free counseling for military personnel who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan and their families. The YWCA of Greater Austin, which provides counseling services emphasizing women’s needs, is initiating services for women veterans. And with funding from United Way Capital Area, the YWCA is launching a program to help day care workers identify pre-school children with emotional and mental health issues.
Family Connections offers counseling services for more than 7,000 families, including 4,750 new mothers with post-partum depression symptoms. Lifeworks provides free and affordable counseling to homeless and at-risk youth.
Children whose mental health needs go unmet often exhibit violent behavior. School age youth arrest rates for murder and aggravated offenses in Travis County and Austin is rising alarmingly, and dating violence is increasing exponentially as well. The Council On At-Risk Youth is dedicated to helping youth prevent violence, drug abuse and delinquency and conducts the Youth Violence Prevention program at six middle school in Austin. A whopping 50 percent of youth in the juvenile justice system have an undiagnosed mental illness.
Travis County has had the highest suicide rate of any metropolitan Texas county for the past five years, particularly among high school and college age youth. The New Milestone Foundation supports ATCMHMR programs through fundraising and public awareness campaigns that promote awareness and battle stigma. Mental Health America of Texas, the oldest citizens’ mental health advocacy and education organization in Texas, promotes legislative campaigns, public awareness initiatives and innovative programming at the local level, such as the successful Parents As Teachers program.
These and many other Central Texas mental health professionals face enormous challenges in trying to care for our community’s growing mental health needs, particularly among our Spanish-speaking population. To find out more about how you can help, please review the list of mental health agencies at ilivehereigivehere.org. Together we can change attitudes and erase the stigma surrounding mental illness, creating a more caring and healthy community.
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