By KELLY WILSON

Herald-Whig Staff Writer

As executive director of Transitions of Western Illinois, Mike Rein has seen firsthand how mental health services can change lives.

"When you can provide early intervention services, you can prevent a person from totally crashing and burning and losing it all -- job, home, family," he said. "What we've been able to do at Transitions is provide a safety net through our case management staff, taking care of people who have chronic but mild mental illness.

"Without that case management service, within six months (some clients) would be homeless, wandering the streets, carrying their belongings."

Mental health problems and illnesses are real and disabling conditions that are experienced by one in five Americans, according to a supplement to the Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health.

"Left untreated, mental illnesses can result in disability and despair for families, schools, communities and the workplace," the report said. "This toll is more than any society can afford."

Yet, Rein says, the state of Illinois does a poor job in funding mental health services -- services that he says if provided upfront could not only improve or save lives, but could prevent costly consequences that occur when people with mental illnesses don't have access to treatment.

"Illinois ranks last of all 50 states in the percent of the state budget spent on human services," he said. "That's unconscionable."

He said the state ranks ninth out of the 50 states in per capita income.

"Our priorities are kind of screwed up," Rein said. "The road to recovery is such a positive thing. There's no reason to backslide from this."

Transitions received word Aug. 8 that state funding for the current budget year, which began July 1, would be cut by eight-tenths of a percent, and that more cuts were expected.

Rein said the fiscal 2009 funding already represented no growth from the previous two years.

In addition, the Blagojevich administration has said serving the "poorest of the poor and sickest of the sick" is the state's priority, Rein said, and wants to shift the responsibility for other mental health services, including vital early intervention services, to the state's counties.

"There are many people who live in our community who aren't the sickest or the poorest, yet the money from the state we've used to provide services -- whether it be case management, visiting the person in the home, checking up on them, whether it be psychiatrists or therapists who meet with them -- the governor wants to shift that responsibility to the county, to make every county in the state raise the money through local taxes and pay for what the governor has said is a local problem," Rein said.

He said the state has not talked to county officials about the situation.

"I fear there will be a gap in timing between when the state money is gone and before the county money appears. That may take a year, three years, five years, we don't know," Rein said. "In Adams County, we don't have a mental health tax levy. The counties like Adams that don't have one, there will be a time gap, and we are at that juncture now where the state money is disappearing."

Rein emphasizes that treating people in the early stages of mental illness costs less than waiting until crisis situations that lead to costly emergency room visits and hospitalizations.

Limited access to mental health services also can be costly in other ways.

Instead of getting treatment at Transitions or other agencies, "they're going to commit some petty crime, they clog up the jails, they clog up the emergency room, they begin to clog up the court systems," Rein said.

"We begin to see drains on other systems in the community because of this neglect."

-- kwilson@whig.com/221-3391