Austin Travis County MHMR - The Art of Propaganda

I attended a presentation by Austin Travis County MHMR’s MCOT team yesterday. How compassionate and sincere these two people were. I totally believe in their personal ethics and desire to help people in our community. However, I do not believe for one minute what ATC-MHMR has told them to tell the community. Like most new employees at ATC-MHMR, they had been brainwashed by ATC-MHMR’s propaganda. They explained that Travis County has over-utilized beds in the state hospital and not paid for the costs incurred by the state for their overutilization. The state has now banned them from having beds until they pay up. This situation was described by the presenters as a “pissing contest” who offered the currrent economic woes and underfunding of mental health treatment as the cause. Having worked at ATC-MHMR for more than a decade and having watched these changes occur, I disagree for the following reasons:

1) The state of Texas has been citing Austin Travis County MHMR for overutilizing hospital beds for years and telling them to stop it. They have waived the costs (in the millions) year after year. The only people “pissing” in this contest is MHMR. They refuse to provide adequate treatment for the patients in their county and callously put the burden to other systems to pick up the slack so they can keep more of the money allocated for said treatment for their administrators. Ask anyone in social services in Austin. They will tell you they cannot get psychiatric treatment for their clients in Austin.

2) ATC-MHMR has been crying “lack of funds” for years, while at the same time spending $250,000 of the funds given to them on redecorating their offices and gods only know how many millions on computers and software for “billing” and monitoring how many minutes their employees spend on each task. They have purchased works of art for the administrative offices and architecturally redesigned the entire Center Administration building. This does not sound like people with no funding.

3) MHMR refuses funding. Numerous funders have been willing to provide ATC-MHMR with grants and other funds - IF they lower their exorbitantly high administrative costs. The ATC-MHMR Board of Directors discussed whether to lower the administrative costs or refuse the funding and voted to refuse funding on all future projects with this requirement. This is in the minutes for the Board of Directors meetings if anyone cares to look it up.

Does this sound like the behavior of people without enough funding?

4) Because of the need to purchase billions of dollars of weaponry to blow up civilians in Iraq funding for social services is dropping everywhere. This is true. But why is it that only Travis County is overutilizing beds? Dallas, Houston and San Antonio have not been having such woes. Why? ATC-MHMR claims that it is because of the large homeless population in Austin and the location of the state hospital in Austin. People are sent here from other counties to be hospitalized, then discharged here. There may be some truth to this, but MHMR has provided no documentation or statistics on the actual numbers involved. And since the state hospital has always been here, why is it only since David Evans has become Executive Director of MHMR that the location of the state hospital and the homeless population is a problem?

5) MHMR also claims that the boom Austin is experiencing is causing an added burden. If so, why are they not addressing that increase in population and therefore funds needed with the federal government who provides their funding?

All of these arguments seem plausible, until you walk into the administrative offices. Notice the art, the architecture, and the elaborate computer systems they will utilize to demonstrate the ‘lack of funds’. Right.