Mental Health Services Deserve Greater Funding (and Oversight)

If we have not gone through this directly, we’ve seen it on the news enough times to know how it goes. Innocent victims die in a place of learning. The public is outraged and heartbroken. Parents call for more safety measures; students walk out of class to do something — anything — to display their ongoing dismay.

It doesn’t matter if it happened on the East Coast or the West; the young people inside the classrooms where active shooter drills happen on a regular basis have that terrible feeling that it’s only a matter of time before the tragedies hit home. This time, it was Bend. Two years ago, it was also nearly Bend. Two years before that, it was Bend, in a grocery store, rather than a school. We have an ongoing problem with our disaffected young men.

Ideological camps have been set up, with wide trenches between.

One camp says it’s the guns. Without access, no tragedy.

The other camp says sure, a gun was the weapon, but it’s the mental health issue. With better access, no tragedy.

The anti-gun side lobs its most powerful barbs across the trench. The barb lands, and then falters, like Oregon’s voter-approved Measure 114 requiring simple background checks, lodged in the courts, for years on end now.

And still the young people line up outside waving messages on cardboard, knowing that if they or one of their friends has a mental health crisis in this town, there is exactly one acute youth mental health bed in the region where they can go for help — and that one was only recently installed, at much effort.

We do not profess to be able to solve one of America’s most intractable arguments here on this editorial page, simply because our city now boasts having the youngest school shooting victim, 5-year-old Rhoam Summer, in history.

But what we keep coming back to in these trying times is the crisis around mental health. We seem to agree that our community has an acute crisis in this area. Let the court fight around Measure 114 play out, let the investigations reveal whether the mother of the shooter in the Silver Rail Elementary School shooting violated the existing law, ORS 166.395, which requires firearms to be secured, and then let’s move onto putting all of our anguish and pain, all our frustration and anger, into righting the wrongs of our state’s mental health crisis, together.

We did not get to be #39 in youth mental health and dead last in overall mental health in the U.S. from this horrific event that just happened in our city. Nor did we earn the distinction of being one of the worst states for chronic absenteeism due to this shooting.

We got here through chronic under-investments in behavioral health — the workforce, the facilities and the trainings, to just name a few. The same legislature that in 2021 did away with the truancy laws that help keep kids connected to school communities (and ironically, sometimes led to referrals for mental health interventions, as our reporting this week reveals), also in 2021 passed a behavioral health package of over $1 billion. Later reporting found that oversight and tracking of that spending fell short. Only in the past year or so have authorities provided “the kind of tracking and transparency that earlier funding efforts lacked,” reads a report from the Common Sense Institute of Oregon. We are only just starting to tackle this problem, and more attention to its nuances from a wide-eyed public could certainly help.

We all want to do something to make the madness stop, and to ensure that our children feel safe in spaces of learning, but the writing has been on the wall for years. Oregon needs more support for the children with special needs who fall through the cracks, for the educators with their fingers in the dikes, for the families to whom these kids go home and often continue to struggle, and for the many policy makers and big thinkers who have great ideas, but need someone to hold them accountable.

Fixing the mental health crisis in our community is not simple. It requires education and awareness surrounding a part of our population that we have to our detriment ostracized, and in many cases shunned out of fear and ignorance. That should change. And most importantly, it requires a sizeable contribution by county, state and federal governments into these programs. The current level of funding is not enough and that means reprioritizing and investing. This will not come without a cost, but as we have seen, the cost of doing nothing is much higher.