Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon speaks to residents at Western Wyoming Community College Wednesday morning during a town hall meeting on mental health. SweetwaterNOW photo by David Martin.
ROCK SPRINGS – A discussion about mental health resources in Wyoming focused on addiction recovery and the challenges Wyoming residents face in seeking appropriate mental health care.
Gov. Mark Gordon was in Rock Springs to moderate the discussion Wednesday morning, which is part of a series of public meetings aimed at learning more about what’s working and what needs to be improved when it comes to mental health care in the State. One topic that showed possible successes was drug treatment, particularly the county’s treatment court program.
Treatment Court is a nonprofit, court-ordered drug treatment program that operates through partnerships between law enforcement agencies, the County Attorney’s Office, the Circuit Court and others. Whitney Majhanovich said the court treatment program helped her because without it she likely would have been sent to prison, saying she learned to use local organizations as resources to help her recovery while she was in the court treatment program.
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Challenges also exist, especially when it comes to accessing qualified mental health care, according to one Rock Springs resident. Tammi Orr is a 70-year-old resident who has struggled with mental illness in her family throughout her life. Orr said services for people suffering from addiction are excellent, but people facing other forms of mental illness don’t have the same resources.
“Families just didn’t know where to turn,” she said.
She faced challenges when she began to suffer from deteriorating mental health and worked with a psychologist who she said did not have experience diagnosing and treating mental illnesses in children. the elderly. She went to the Huntsman Mental Health Institute in Utah after hearing about it through social media and discovered the care she needed. She wonders why local partnerships with the Huntsman Mental Health Institute or other leading mental health providers aren’t coming to fruition and dreams of a day when the state is a model for what can be done well in mental health treatment.
Gordon said partnerships are one of the key ways to improve access to mental health care, saying partnerships between government, nonprofits and faith groups could improve access and expand more available resources. Gordon cites faith-based initiatives such as Volunteers of America and 12-step programs helping people with drug addiction and said the state has been contacted by faith-based organizations and nonprofits about how to better help residents .
Gordon also said the state is not looking to expand government and sees local initiatives and organizations as the best places to serve Wyoming residents. The Legislature will look at areas where it can restore previous budget cuts made during the COVID-19 pandemic when it decides what to do with about $870 million in excess budget funds next year. The Wyoming Department of Health and other state agencies have received about half a billion in cuts during the COVID-19 pandemic.
