A Dual Pandemic The Public Health and Mental Health Crisis By Sara Boerenko, LCSW, Public Health Director, Montgomery County
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rior to March 2020, the nation was in the midst of a mental health and opiate crisis. There was a lack of providers, a lack of program staff, and high rates of suicide and overdose in the United States. Going forward through the COVID-19 pandemic, suicide and overdose did not stop. The workforce crisis and shortage of providers grew. In Montgomery County, we saw an increase in the need for behavioral health services, access to care and community-based services to meet people “where they are at.”
and community-based organizations that were getting back to home visits.
As a dual department, we were able to integrate COVID work with behavioral health work. Our staff, while making daily quarantine/isolation calls to patients, also inquired about how patients were doing mentally. Staff asked patients how they were feeling, talked to them about the fears they had and how they were taking care of their own mental health. Often the stress of isolation was due to not being able to work, not being able to see family and loved ones; fears related to obtaining basic needs such as food, milk, diapers, baby formula.
Our teams also continued to host and train the community on Mental Health First Aid. A typical class of 25 participants was cut down to 10; however, we held five classes at capacity and welcomed 50 new mental health first aiders to our county. We also took calls from community members that who had lost family and were looking for a friendly voice to talk to as a way to combat the loneliness and isolation they were feeling.
We helped connect our patients with crisis hotline numbers and food pantries that made home deliveries, worked with our legislator to arrange Meals on Wheels to drop food to elderly, and assisted with getting families basic needs to alleviate the mental stress of isolation. Upon opening the county in a safe manner, we immediately began hosting small Narcan trainings for our community. We held five trainings, limiting the groups to seven people, spaced out, and under 20 minutes. By doing this, over the course of four months, we trained 34 new people on opiate overdose response procedures. We also met with community members one-on-one to provide individual trainings. In all, we had 47 new community members trained on how to use Narcan. Further, in our down time, we assembled and delivered over 500 opiate overdose response bags to local volunteer fire departments, our police departments, ambulance services, 26
NYSAC News | Summer 2022
Since social media was used so much to disseminate information, we ran weekly mental health and substance use campaigns offering messages of hope to our community. Our largest ad campaign ran for three months and advertised the local HELPLINE number with a message: “The Link: substance use – overdose – suicide.”
Staff in our department offered phone calls to those needing support. A few community members did ask to see us in person. When it was possible and safe, I did allow a few (four) community members to come to our department to meet with me to discuss how they were struggling with various aspects of this new normal. One of the people I met with still calls me every so often to say hello and sent our department a beautiful Christmas card. There are endless stories of what the Montgomery County Public Health and Mental Health Departments did during the pandemic on top of the workload of managing the actual pandemic. But the hard work, the heavy lifting starts now. We see the damage done as a result of services halting for two years and we need to get back to overall health and wellness. We learned that for the next pandemic, we are better prepared to assist with a holistic approach to our community. We know how to provide behavioral health services in conjunction with emergency preparedness measures to ensure wellness.
