The Lake County Health Department and Community Health Center received two grants worth more than $1.6 million to expand mental health services in the county, the department announced Tuesday.
The grants come from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Illinois Children’s Healthcare Foundation, a statewide nonprofit.
The federal grant, worth up to $400,000 annually for four years, will support ongoing efforts to integrate mental health and primary care services at the county’s behavioral health center in Libertyville. According to health department officials, the logic that if a mental health patient can receive primary care treatment at the same facility, it lowers the risk of death or illness.
The money will specifically focus on conditions like obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, the county said in a news release.
People with chronic mental illness “tend to die 20 to 25 years earlier than the general population,” said Mark Pfister, the health department’s interim executive director, in the release. “These deaths are often due to a lack of engagement in care of treatable and preventable medical conditions. To address this concern, we recently added primary care services to our Outpatient Mental Health Services program in Libertyville to provide its mental health patients with easy access to medical care. The grant will substantially reinforce this initiative.”
Patients will also have access to counseling on substance abuse, tobacco cessation and nutrition, the department said. Psychiatry, therapy and general medical care are already available at the site.
Leslie Piotrowski, a health department spokeswoman, said the initiative is “for the convenience of our mental health patients” and to detect “health issues that just tend to go unaddressed.”
“Let’s say they have an appointment with a therapist,” she said. “They can also, at that same time or right afterward, make an appointment for a primary care visit.”
The second grant, from the Illinois Children’s Healthcare Foundation, is a two-year award worth $84,500. It will support a mental health first-aid training program for individuals and agencies throughout the county that serve children. The training sessions will begin in the spring.
The grant will target employees at schools, juvenile justice agencies, faith-based organizations and youth-oriented nonprofits. It will also fund two part-time counselors in the county’s Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health Services Program at the health department’s Waukegan location, at 3010 Grand Ave.
The program will train workers to identify mental health disorders among young people and connect them to treatment resources, according to the release.
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