Photo by Amber Wilkie
The District will blend its Department of Mental Health and a Department of Health office devoted to combatting substance abuse into a new, consolidated agency, Mayor Vince Gray said today.
The Department of Behavioral Health, which will begin operations on October 1, will take combine the resources of the Department of Mental Health with the Addiction, Prevention and Recovery Administration (APRA), a little-mentioned Health Department bureau that focuses on treating and reducing substance abuse across the city. The merger, Gray and other District officials said, will put D.C.’s mental health apparatus on par with many states that house both mental health and drug treatment functions under the same bureaucratic roof.
The move is logical, the officials said, because of the high rate of concurrence between mental health disorders and substance abuse, and the new Department of Behavioral Health, Gray said, will help D.C. to “treat both with better outcomes.”
The District is home to 35,000 people receiving treatment for mental health or substance abuse, Gray said, and there is a great deal of overlap between the two. Steve Baron, the director of the Department of Mental Health, said combining the agencies will provide a better conduit for treatment providers to offer more comprehensive approaches to their patients who may be seeking care for multiple disorders.
“Access has become easier, but it’s still a challenge,” said Baron, who will head up the new agency.
Dr. Saul Levin, the Department of Health’s interim director who previously headed APRA, also noted the patterns between long-term illnesses and behavioral health issues. “Chronic disease have very strong mental health and substance abuse components,” he said. “Everyone should be doing an assessment.”
From a bureaucratic perspective, the merger will put together the 1,100-employee Department of Mental Health with the 91 full-time employees at APRA. The Department of Mental Health has a budget of roughly $250 million, Baron said, counting all local, federal and Medicaid funding. APRA, meanwhile, has a combined budget of about $32 million, Levin said.
Mental health and drug treatment professionals at the news conference announcing the new department’s creation applauded the move. The Department of Behavioral Health will “welcome individuals with complex needs,” said Richard Bebout, the chief clinical officer at Community Connections, a mental health service on Capitol Hill.
