Photo by Andrew Laker | Columbus Regional Health Columbus Regional Health Vice President of Community Partnerships and Corporate Responsibility Julie Abedian appears in an interview at Columbus Regional Hospital on Thursday, May 30, 2019.
Community members are invited to attend an event that will mark the official launch of a new collaboration focused on mental health.
There will be a kickoff event from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at The Commons on April 5 to mark the launch of “a community-wide initiative that addresses challenges and improves the mental health system for the well-being of Bartholomew County,” according to officials with the city. . The night will include remarks from experts and local leaders in health care, education and government.
The event is presented by Mayor Jim Lienhoop, City of Columbus; Carl Lienhoop, Bartholomew County commissioners; Regional Executive Officer Suzanne Koesel, Centerstone Indiana; President and CEO Jim Bickel, Columbus Regional Health; Superintendent Jim Roberts, Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp.; and President Mark Stewart, United Way Bartholomew County.
Local leaders have said the new initiative is aimed at addressing a deepening mental health crisis in Bartholomew County and the surrounding area.
Over the past year, Columbus Regional Health’s Healthy Communities initiative has laid the groundwork for new mental health efforts, including aligning resources and creating staff, said Julie Abedian, CRH’s vice president of community partnerships and accountability. corporation, in a previous interview. .
The mental health initiative — which is expected to include Columbus city and Bartholomew County governments, as well as the county health system, local behavioral health system and local education system — will be largely modeled after the collaborative efforts that led to the creation of the Alliance for Substance Abuse Advancement, or ASAP, an organization that launched in 2017 as part of a community-wide effort to combat the opioid crisis and substance use, officials said.
Abedian said the push for the mental health initiative was fueled in large part by the 2021 Community Health Needs Assessment for CRH’s service area.
The assessment found that:
- The suicide rate for the service area nearly doubled from 9.2 per 100,000 people from 2007 to 2009 to 19 per 100,000 from 2017 to 2019, according to the 2018 and 2021 estimates.
- Nearly 1 in 3 respondents in Bartholomew County had been diagnosed with a depressive disorder.
- There were far fewer mental health providers per capita in Bartholomew County than in the US overall.
- 25.9% of Bartholomew County respondents rated their mental health as “fair” or “poor,” compared to 14.9% in 2018.
“We have a history in our community of being able to improve the health of our community when we work collectively,” Abedian said. “…Although the mental health crisis seems overwhelming and scary, we believe and have faith that if we approach this set of issues in the same way we have with the opioid crisis and infant mortality, we can have a positive impact on mental health of our community.”
