Mental health assistance available for inmates in Southeast Iowa

The mental health crisis is a nationwide epidemic that affects people of all ages. For those incarcerated, help can seem even harder to find but a local sherif reported there are services available for everyone who needs them.

Henry County Sheriff Rich McNamee said the Henry County Jail contracts for medical and mental health assistance with Advanced Correctional Healthcare (ACH) out of Peoria, IL. Through ACH there is a nurse on staff 20 hours a week who deals with all medical and mental health related problems.

Through ACH, a medical doctor and mental health doctor are on staff too, he said, and are on call 24/7, 365 days a year.

'They come every third week to review the nurses actions, medications, issues with inmates etcetera. We just started the mental health portion of that a year ago,” he said, adding ACH has been the medical provider for Henry County inmates since 2014.

In case of an emergency, such as a stroke or heart attack, the inmate is then rushed to the emergency room, he said.

All inmates in Henry County have both medical and mental health services offered to them right in the jail. McNamee said this is a change from what the facility used to do which was transport inmates to get them the help they needed.

When the Iowa Mental Health Institute was open in Mt. Pleasant, McNamee said inmates would be transported there for treatment. The facility was closed in 2015 and since then getting help for inmates has not been as easy as transporting them next door, he said.

'In the early 90s that's the way it worked. In the mid-90s they really put some restrictions on that and we couldn't do that anymore so we would have to take them to the hospital and we've death with commitments ever since,” he said.

Inmates have the option of seeing a mental health provider one a week or once ever two weeks depending on their condition. If the person is in crisis, they can see a nurse every day if they need to, he said.

There is no waiting list for the service and if someone is picked up for an offense, such as public intoxication and it is related to mental health, he said, the inmate can see a nurse first thing in the morning.

'If there's a crisis we'll do it even faster,” he said, explaining if there is as inmate who is suicidal or homicidal they will call an on-call doctor to assist them. 'We can have an inmate in front of a medical expert in a few hours.”

The services ACH provide are paid for with county tax dollars and comes out of his budget, he said. Once the patient is released from jail, they are entered into a transition program paid for through the Southeast Iowa Link (SEIL), a group that services eight counties in southeast Iowa including Henry, Jefferson and Washington.

McNamee said the services a patient receives at ACH work hand in hand with the transition program to ensure the patient still is receiving the same level of mental health care they did while incarcerated.

'If our medical nurse and our medical doctor and our mental health doctor all say that John Doe's got issues that need contended with, whether by medicine, therapy or inpatient treatment, they will work with the jail transition people so that when John Doe gets out of jail he's still getting his meds and getting appointments with the doctor,” he said.

Sarah Berndt, Coordinator of Disability Services and Transition Link Program Director has been overseeing the program for the last three years. The program follows a national initiative called Stepping Up, which has a goal to reduce the number of people booked into or held in jail longer due to mental health or substance abuse issues.

Berndt said when someone is brought into jail they are given a screener with seven or eight questions. Depending on their answers, the individual can be flagged as a person who would benefit from assistance.

While incarcerated, the individuals are worked with to help create a plan for when they are discharged. Berndt said her staff is then able to make a recommendation to another facility to help the inmate transition back into society while still receiving the same level of care they did while incarcerated.

Looking back on his career, McNamee said losing the Iowa Mental Health Institute in town has really effected the mental health crisis in Henry County but feels law enforcement is taking every step it can to bridge the gap and provide the services people need.

'I would say over the last couple of years it got worse and worse with meth and military issues in the Middle East and all kinds of drug issues. I think we started seeing an uprising in the number of mental health cases and it got worse before it got better,” he said.

McNamee said by hiring ACH in 2014, Henry County was able to get ahead of the closure and adapt on the medical side of things. Due to the rise in mental health related issues, that was added to the county's contract with ACH last year.

'I think the problem is bigger but we're dealing with it more directly. Because the mental health institutes closed around Iowa, we thought, ‘we can't just let somebody out of jail and take them to a mental health institute anymore'. That's why we contracted with ACH and I think we're dealing with it more efficiently than we did a few years ago,” he said.