Mental Health
Kansas City-area supporters strive to reopen eating disorder clinic
Approximately 30 million Americans – two-thirds of them women – battle a clinically significant eating disorder during their lifetime, and hundreds of thousands of these people live in Missouri or Kansas,
State scrutiny of early head start programs prompts questions
One of Kansas’ largest early childhood development programs has decided not to reapply for nearly $1 million in Early Head Start funding because of difficulties dealing with a state agency. “This wasn’t something we wanted to do,” said Teresa Rupp, longtime executive director at Child Start, a Wichita-based program that provides Head Start and Early…
Forum develops a healthy to-do list for Kansas City area
The Kansas City of the future would be a place where people have affordable medical care, policymakers work with the community on health issues and residents suffer less from chronic diseases and violence. That, at any rate, is the consensus that emerged Saturday at a forum in Kansas City, Mo. And it was just the…
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Documentary casts light on Kansas City’s mental health care woes
The state of Kansas City’s mental health care services is dire, according to a forthcoming new documentary. Journalist and documentary filmmaker Michael Price’s Lost Minds: KC’s Mental Health Crisis focuses on the growing number of fraught confrontations between severely mentally ill people and police on Kansas City’s streets. The locally produced documentary airs Wednesday, Oct. 1, at…
Johnson County names DeWeese as mental health director
Johnson County announced Thursday that it has hired a new director for its mental health center. The new hire is Tim DeWeese, a longtime staff member of the Johnson County Mental Health Center. For nearly the past two years, DeWeese has served as director of clinical services, overseeing the largest operating division of the center….
KDADS analysis identifies 11 communities with greater mental health needs
A Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services official said Thursday that the agency has identified 11 communities that appear to be referring inordinate numbers of patients to the state hospitals for mentally ill or have above-average numbers of inmates in the state’s correctional systems who are known to be mentally ill. “We’ve been going…
Early signs show promise for Rainbow Mental Health, officials say
A reconstituted mental health facility in Kansas City, Kan., has been a financial and therapeutic success in its first five months of operation, officials involved in the transition said Wednesday. “It’s great news so far,” said Kari Bruffett, secretary of the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services (KDADS), “and I think it’s only going…
Ottawa shooting renews focus on crisis intervention training
Out of the 8,000 full- and part-time law enforcement officers in Kansas, only 1 in 4 have been trained to handle crisis calls involving the mentally ill. Records show that 80 percent of the nearly 1,800 trained officers work in four high-population counties: Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee and Wyandotte. The other 20 percent – about 360…
Kansas mental health system under increasing stress
OSAWATOMIE — One day last month, Osawatomie State Hospital had 254 patients in its care — almost 50 more than its optimal capacity. The overcrowded conditions forced a few dozen patients, all of them coping with a serious mental illness and likely a danger to themselves or others, to be triple-bunked in rooms meant for two….