EVEN MORE NEGLECT FOR MENTAL HEALTH?

Already shameful levels of state support for the mentally and emotionally
ill in Virginia face further reductions. The state's most vulnerable people
deserve better.

WHEN LAWMAKERS in Richmond get down to playing a bad budget hand, they
should deal out already underfunded community mental health services.

In the context of the billions of dollars Virginia will spend through the
next biennium, the cuts proposed for community-based mental health, mental
retardation and substance abuse services seem small: $5 million in the
current fiscal year; $25.6 million over the next two years.

Those millions, though, are threads holding together the safety net the
state spreads to keep its most vulnerable residents from falling into total
dependency, and it is a mighty thin net as is.

Snipping those threads would be sure to result in greater costs elsewhere:
in emergency interventions, admissions to state facilities, increases in
the populations of homeless people on the streets and in shelters, and a
growing number of "guests" in jails, prisons and juvenile detention centers.

And those costs will be figured in mere dollars. They will not begin to
touch the toll on the lives of people whose tenuous hold on normalcy will
break if they lose what few supports the state provides.

The Virginia Association of Community Services Boards already reports
waiting lists of severely disabled people - not a new story in a wealthy
state shamelessly settled at or near the bottom of rankings of state support.

Unprecedented, though, are plans to cut spending from the state's general
fund without even the suggestion of any alternative revenue source. The
state association estimates that in fiscal 2003, more than 13,000 people
will lose mental health, mental retardation and substance abuse services.

The executive director of Blue Ridge Behavioral Healthcare, the community
services board that serves the Roanoke Valley, predicts the damage to core
services here will significantly increase institutionalization.

As localities' outpatient capacity gets narrower and narrower, Jim Sikkema
said, people become more and more disabled before they can get help. "We'll
be catching them later and later in their illnesses, which makes it all the
more difficult to treat."

Virginia has many pressing needs, many public servants with legitimate
claims for pay raises that, they are told, will not be coming. The state
needs more revenue. Its leaders must gather the political courage to raise
taxes.

Whether they do or not, they should not look to the state's most vulnerable
people to shoulder a proportionate share of the budget pain, because they
will suffer disproportionate consequences. These people simply do not have
the material or emotional resources to cushion such a blow.

A state that already does so little cannot, in good conscience, do less.