Assertive Community Treatment, or the ACT Program, is meant to help those in the community with severe and persistent mental illness.
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare says ACT teams strive to function as a psychiatric hospital without walls, helping people maintain recovery in the community and reduce psychiatric hospital and jail stays.
Ric Boyce, LCSW, is the CEO and a counselor at Mental Health Specialists of Pocatello. He says ACT is invaluable for those with severe mental illness.
“It’s a program where we send out counselors, we send out nurses, we send out employment specialists and substance abuse specialist peer specialists, and prescribers to make sure that people who are at the highest risk in our community are getting the mental health care that they need,” Boyce says.
“Many are coming out of jail; many are coming out of hospitals. And what we do is we make sure that they are connected with whatever level of services they can handle.”
ACT operates in a way different from most treatments, as it serves those that may have schizophrenia, bipolar or major depressive disorder who may not be as successful in traditional mental health treatment.
“This isn’t the typical mental health population,” Boyce says of those served by ACT.
Since last year, the program has been administered by Magellan Health Services as part of the Idaho Behavioral Health Plan. After recent state-level funding cuts to Medicaid, Magellan announced to behavioral healthcare providers last week that funding for ACT would be getting cut as well, effective December 1st.
Providers like Boyce are highly concerned about what this means for a vulnerable population.
“This is a critical piece of the state’s infrastructure that is getting cut away with no oversight and being done at breakneck speed,” he says. “I would rate this as the very, very last mental health service that should ever get cut.”
Legislators reached out to providers this weekend, attempting to clarify that the ACT program itself is not being cut, but that funding cuts will cause it to be restructured into a fee for service model.
Boyce and other providers maintain that only two of the original twenty services provided by ACT will remain in place, leaving only in-office counseling and medication for those in the program, effectively rendering ACT nonexistent.
With only weeks before the decision takes effect, and without an adequate contingency, providers are worried for the safety of those in the program, and the public.
“And every time we ever hear that there is a school shooting or some kind of mental health incident, we hear, oh, more things need to be done on the mental health end of things,” Boyce says. “This is the one service that is able to provide the aggressive outreach to all aspects of the community.”