The Legislature's Joint Finance Committee on Wednesday easily approved seven Assembly bills designed to enhance mental health care in Wisconsin.
The move paves the way for Senate approval this spring.
The bills provide funding for crisis intervention training, mental health mobile crisis units, a child psychiatry consultation program, and grants for primary care and psychiatrists to work in underserved areas. The bills also fund peer-run respite centers, psychiatric treatment programs and employment programs for people with mental illness.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has written extensively about problems with the Milwaukee County mental health system through its Chronic Crisis investigation.
All of the bills passed unanimously or on 14-1 votes without discussion. The bipartisan support prompted the committee's co-chairwoman, Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), to joke that she hoped this would be a sign of "things to come."
Crisis intervention training is designed to educate police officers and other social service providers with the signs of mental illness in hopes of averting a crisis. Participants are taught ways to provide therapeutic care before a crisis develops.
Mobile crisis units consist of psychologists, nurses and police officers who go into the community to address a problem with the hope that the person in crisis does not have to be hospitalized.
Respite centers are places where people in psychiatric crisis can go when they are too sick to be left on their own but not sick enough to be considered a danger to themselves or others. Peers — people with a mental health diagnosis — often work at these centers to provide support for the patients.
Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend) dissented on three of the bills because he said he has concerns about overuse of prescriptions by psychiatrists, particularly those who treat children.
Grothman said the bills would not have a major effect one way or the other but that he is nevertheless "not eager to put more money into those occupations."
"I think pediatric mental health professionals prescribe too many drugs for our young people," Grothman said.
Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report from Madison.
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