Group deliberates mental health plan > Experts say retardation services given low priority

HERMON — Edna Taber of Bangor and her husband raised two adopted children who at times needed help from the Maine Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation.

She is relieved the boys are grown now, Taber said, because she doubts they would get the same services today they received in the past under the current restructuring chaos going on within the department.

Taber joined about 50 parents, clients and service providers at a forum Friday afternoon to learn more about Commissioner Melodie Peet’s proposal to save $5 million by reorganizing a state department that has a dual role of helping people with mental health problems and helping people with mental retardation.

An unhealthy competition has been forced between those key populations the department serves because, officials say, mental health clients have been considered in the cost-saving plan but mental retardation clients have not been given a voice, or a choice, in the plan.

The high priority given to realigning mental health services and the low priority given to programs for those with retardation is ironic because groups serving retarded clients have done a much better job of getting their clients into the community, a key goal of Peet’s, according to experts at Friday’s meeting.

The plan is scheduled to be discussed by the Human Resources Committee next Tuesday, and the full Productivity Realization Task Force will consider it later this month.

Calling for consolidation of various divisions and regions statewide, the plan proposes far-reaching changes in a department that boasts a budget of $173.8 million for the 1996 fiscal year.

The plan most likely will be approved by the task force, and it will profoundly affect the way services are delivered to a segment of the state’s most vulnerable population, according to people at the meeting.

Complicated by pending Medicaid reform at the national level, specifically a measure that would eliminate automatic entitlement to Medicaid for most people with mental disabilities or retardation, the Peet proposal presents a “very significant challenge” to the state’s disabled population, said Bonnie Brooks, executive director of the Hermon-based OHI. OHI is an organization that helps people with mental disabilities obtain housing and other services.

Brooks presided at the meeting where Taber and others expressed concern about the speedy way Augusta bureaucrats, including the governor, prepared and gave preliminary approval to the plan.

A 73-page report outlining Peet’s proposal was presented at the meeting. The plan “came about rather quickly to my understanding,” said Brooks, who also serves on a state committee that advises the commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation.

Taber and others were a bit more blunt in their summary of the cost-saving plan’s genesis, and the way it was presented to the people most affected by it.

“It was dropped on us like a parachute out of the sky,” said Taber, an educator who has taught skills to people with various disabilities for 25 years.

All told, Peet’s plan would result in a net loss of 72 jobs. It calls for privatization of the Bath Children’s Home. It would reduce from five to three the regions in the state that localize services for DMH-MR clients. It even would rename the Augusta-based department to the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services.

It would eliminate 44 jobs at Bangor Mental Helath Institute, 15.5 of them already vacant, and would eliminate 25 jobs at Augusta Mental Health Institute, 21 of them vacant.

The issue that concerned Taber and others most was the plan to merge children’s services with the Office of Substance Abuse and with general services to mentally ill and retarded clients.

The needs of children with retardation or mental health problems are “vastly different” from those of adults, according to Taber. She said people dealing with mentally disabled clients usually are skilled with adults or children, but not with both.

She questioned the wisdom of merging programs with the result that some state employees might have responsibility for both youngsters and adults needing services.

“Somewhere, somebody is going to get cheated. I’m afraid it will be the consumers,” said Taber, who also is chairwoman of a local board of directors operating various group homes in the area.

Some parts of the plan are good, meeting participants said, such as the call to turn the $5 million saved by streamlining the bureaucracy back into the department to help assure state compliance with various consent decrees. The general move away from institutions toward the community is good, provided adequate services are present to ease the transition, the group said.

Yet the general consensus of the group was that the plan needs more thought and much more local comment before it is made final in Augusta, to prevent a decline in services to people with mental health or retardation problems.

“I wouldn’t want to be a parent trying to get help for my kid and having to deal with the department the way it is now,” said Taber.