Mental Health Care and a Tribute to Health Care Workers

I’m going to open with a short piece on the state of mental health care in Arizona. And most specifically how that affects our health care workers. Mental Health America issued the results of their 2022 survey. It comes on the heels of a midtown neighborhood rejecting a mental health counseling center citing ‘strangers’ being invited into the neighborhood. Well, it seems that’s a pretty common and unfortunate phenomenon in this state. This graph shows a ranking of rates of mental illness combined with access to care. You’ll find Arizona ranked #49 – kind of like how we fund public education.

In Arizona, the percentage of adults with Adult Mental Illness who did not receive treatment increased from 52.7% in 2017-2018 to 57.0% in 2018-2019 (the data point for the survey.) I pulled this graphic from the study. It shows exactly what we were trying to address with the mental health counseling center – we will find a welcoming home for it.

The picture for health care workers is even more grim. Prior to the pandemic burnout affected between a third and a half of doctors and nurses. The MHA folks surveyed in September of 2020 – the beginning of the first COVID surge – and found 93% of health care workers reported stress, 86% reported anxiety, 76% reported exhaustion and 41% reported being lonely. That was nearly at the beginning of COVID. Nobody has any reason to believe that the longer the pandemic lasted our health care front line workers just got used to the long hours, watching patients on ventilators, and telling family members they’d lost their battle with the virus.

So, I open this week with a tribute to our health care workers, and a reminder that mental health is a treatable illness. We’ll find a good home for our city worker counseling facility. And we at the Ward 6 office will continue to celebrate the hard and heroic work being performed in health care settings since COVID became an international thing.

If you’d like to browse through the full MHA report, use this link: https://www.mhanational.org/issues/state-mental-health-america

Gun Control

There is a direct tie between gun violence and the need for access to mental health treatment. The gun control legislation I wrote about last week continues to be massaged in the senate. It’ll then have to go through the reconciliation process before ending up on the president’s desk. In short, there’s a long way to go before anything is enacted, and the longer it takes count on the eventual law being watered down.

We’re not without the ability to effect change with regard to gun safety. Congress will do what they do, but if you’re a gun owner, you can already do your part. First – buy a gun safe and keep your guns stored away in a secure manner. Store weapons separately from ammunition. This map shows where children have been killed due to gun violence so far in 2022. And there have been over 11,000 suicides with guns so far in ‘22. Many of these are preventable through safe storage

Generally, make it difficult for a person who may have thoughts of self-harm to access a weapon. And make it difficult for kids who are just horsing around from finding a loaded weapon laying in a drawer.

Another way to play a positive role in gun safety is do not store them in your car.

From 2018 to date over 1,100 guns have been stolen out of cars in Tucson. That’s 1,100 hot weapons floating around the city that could have been avoided if the owners hadn’t left them in a vehicle. In 2021 we peaked at 334 guns having been stolen from parked vehicles. So far in ‘22 we’re at 84.

The city has an ordinance in place that says you must let TPD know that you’ve either lost your gun, or someone has stolen it.  It’s a commonsense way of alerting the police that there’s a hot gun floating around the community. But even better is to simply not leave a weapon in a locked car. While we wait on D.C. to figure this out, proper storage is a way every gun owner can already be a part of making the community safer.

Click here to View the More Information About City Of Tucson Steve K's Newsletter - June 20, 2022