This recession is hitting everyone hard, some harder than others. And soon it will hit even harder.
The Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities (TDMHDD) will be enacting a 15% cut in its budget come the 1st of July. This department has provided monies to several organizations that have employed me over the past several years. If I was still employed by these agencies, I would be losing my job about then. Friends of multiple years are losing their jobs because of these cuts.
Organizations that do good work may have to shut down entirely, simply because they no longer have enough money to keep going.
Which leads us to why I am writing today. As a part of my job, I do presentations. In one part of my presentations, I show the example of what’s known as “front end” vs. “back end” dollars. You can also call it “prevention” and “crisis treatment” if you would like.
I show that for a small investment on the front end, many lives can be made a whole lot better, versus treating the inevitable crisis that happens when the front end investment is not made.
For example: My local suicide crisis center takes about $95,000 a year to operate. That crisis center helps an average of 60 people a day who are potentially on the verge of suicide. They call the help line and are talked down from the attempt and steered towards the appropriate resources. In the course of a month, that adds up to 1,800 people potentially saved by the expendature of $95,000. If someone actually does attempt or succeed in committing suicide, it costs about $5,000 each incident, for police, EMS and Fire Department resources to either talk that person down or clean up the mess. And that is not including the loss of income over the rest of their lifetime and other income potentially generated by the person who commits suicide.
Now, which is the more efficient expendature of money? The crisis line, of course. If only 3% of the calls were serious attempts at suicide, that’s still about 700 attempts a year. Dividing the operations costs versus the number of lives saved makes it out to be $135 a serious attempt. So we are talking $95k front end, versus up to $3.3 million on the back end. Actually, if you divide the operating costs by the total number of calls, that is less than $5 a call.
And that is exactly where Tennessee is heading. Every one of the groups that I network with are screaming at the top of their lungs. Some may have to shut down entirely, while the others will experience deep cuts in services and personnel.
Everyone is urging myself and others to write, fax and call our state represenatives, senators and the Governor to ask for this money back. The loss of services to those who can afford it least will only cause more trouble in the long run.
Crowding the jail beyond capacity with those who can’t get into a mental facility, wasted resources to clean up what could have been prevented, the list goes on and on.
There is an old saying, “If you think training is expensive, try ignorance.” Well, if you think cutting services saves money, wait until you have to clean up all of the preventable messes caused by these “money saving” initiatives.