Rockford resident Tracy Meinert remembers her first mental breakdown as a teenager.
She was treated for bipolar disorder, a mental illness characterized by severe mood swings from deeply depressed to manic, at Singer Mental Health Center in her 20s and then lived for five years in a nursing home.
In an essay for Stepping Stones’ Instilling Hope magazine, Meinert once wrote that bipolar can be like losing “your direction in the rain on your way to a place you never wanted to go in the first place.”
But bipolar disorder can be managed with medication and treatment, and with the support of Rockford’s Stepping Stones, Meinert says she is on a journey of recovery.
“It’s taking accountability and having my supports in place,” Meinert said. “Supportive living, money management, med management, definitely DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) skills. I do have borderline personality traits, but they don’t define who Tracy is. Kind of like bipolar doesn’t define who I am. It’s part of what I live with.”
Today, Meinert, 58, lives with a roommate and people she considers family in Stepping Stone’s 40-bed River North building, a supportive living apartment building.
The building is just one of many ways that Stepping Stones puts the money it receives from the county’s 0.5% mental health sales tax to work for residents like Meinert and the Rockford community.
Some of the others ways have marked historic milestones for the 52-year-old Rockford-based nonprofit community mental health service provider.
Until recently, Stepping Stones was a program that exclusively provided housing-based mental health services for adults.
But with funding from the county’s mental health sales tax, Stepping Stones has been able to expand its reach and provide services to another population in need — children.
Stepping Stones used the $500,000 it received from the mental health sales tax to open a new outpatient counseling center on Maray Drive in Rockford, and for the first time in Stepping Stones’ history, services were expanded to include mental health treatment for children.
“That was a niche that we felt really needed to be filled,” said Stepping Stones CEO Sue Schroeder. “So about half of the people that we see at the counseling center are below the age of 18.”
The grant helped Stepping Stones defray the cost of buying, renovating and starting up the 8,800-square-foot counseling center. It serves people with serious mental health illness paying with Medicaid or a managed care plan.
Another $200,000 in the agency’s second year of funding was used to help pay for startup. Funding allocated for a third year was never collected by Stepping Stones because the center had become self-sufficient and didn’t need the money, Schroeder said.
“Until we opened the counseling center, we served about 160 individuals every year,” Schroeder said. “This year we’ll be closer to about 800 individuals with that increase coming from the counseling center. And those are people that weren’t getting services before.”
‘An incredible impact’
Proponents of continuing a mental health sales tax say it’s fueling an expansion of mental health and substance use disorder treatment across Rockford and Winnebago County.
With the help of another $500,000 in funds from the Mental Health Board, Stepping Stones purchased and renovated a duplex in Rockford, turning it into a group home for eight men suffering from severe mental illness who receive care 24 hours a day.
Rockford Mayor Tom McNamara said the funding is helping provide critical services and filling what had been gaps in services.
“We can now serve younger people in our community,” McNamara said. “It’s overall a more than four times increase in the number of residents that just that one organization is serving. … For a half-cent, it’s having an incredible impact on our city and how we respond and treat those in need, on their lives and on their family’s lives.”
A 0.5% mental health sales tax that generated about $19 million a year is up for renewal on Nov. 5 ballots.
Jeff Kolkey writes about government, economic development and other issues for the Rockford Register Star. He can be reached at (815) 987-1374, via email at jkolkey@rrstar.com and on X @jeffkolkey.