Mental health crisis hitting rural regions hard

By Ben Singson R EPORTER

The whole of Illinois is going through a mental health crisis, but it is hitting the rural parts of the state the hardest. Now, experts are trying to bring more attention to how it is impacting rural residents.

Though improvements are being made, Illinois mental health advocates are calling for continued improvements to the availability of mental health services in the rural regions.

Mental health services in rural Illinois were lacking even before the COVID­19 pandemic be­ gan. A 2019 report from the Behavioral Health Workforce Education Center found that 93.7% of rural hospitals were in designated mental health shortage areas.

NAMI Illinois Executive Director Andy Wade added that 81 out of 102 Illinois counties had no child psychiatrists working in them.

Wade said that these service shortages had been going on for at least two decades, though they were exacerbated by the pandemic. Providers mostly served urban and suburban regions, he said.

“It’s not that people are suddenly different as human beings,” he said. “It’s that years of neglect in the health system have begun to catch up. Plus, we are in a uniquely stressful time.”

Heritage Behavioral Health Center CEO Mary Garrison said mental health practitioners were disincentivized from working in rural areas because urban areas offered better pay, as well as the isolation from other professionals that working in a rural area could bring. Accessibility was one of “four As” Garrison said were critical to mitigating the mental health crisis — the others being availability, affordability and acceptability, which she said was the biggest piece of it. people into the peer workforce would come to rural parts of the state.

Ariel Skelley/Getty Images Experts say a lack of availability and a cultural stigma surrounding mental health resources are why Illinois' mental health crisis is hitting rural regions the hardest.

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“Even though COVID brought it into light and everyone says, ‘hey, it’s okay to not be okay’... there’s still a stigma about going in and getting the services,” she said.

However, Wade and Garrison both said that work was being done to help assuage the crisis in rural Illinois.

Wade said the existence of networks like Southern Illinois University School of Medicine’s Farm Family Resource Initiative, which provides free telehealth services to rural families, represented “a major step forward” in tackling the crisis. There also had been a significant expansion of the peer workforce, or people who suffered from mental illness becoming practitioners themselves, he said. Wade hoped that programs helping usher

“The talent is already there,” he said, “(but) do we have the opportunities to sort of get people in to one position and support them as they move in to their next career step and go back to school, and all of that?”

Garrison, meanwhile, said there were a crop of awareness campaigns from groups like NAMI Illinois and the Kennedy Forum to bring attention to mental health in the downstate region, though overcoming the stigma of receiving help for mental illness was still the largest obstacle for getting people help.

“We’d love to have the problem (that) there’s so many people coming forward and... now we’ve got to find them services,” she said. “But people still are feeling like maybe they can’t accept the help. They’ll figure it out on their own.”