As the year moves forward, it’s not clear yet what will change or what will remain the same, as officials work to provide the best treatment with the resources available.

Webster County may move to a new Mental Health/Disability Region within the state in the future. For a time, it appeared the county would be forced to make the change in 2019 due to changes in other counties.

Webster County has been part of the 22-county region called County Social Services since 2012, when the Iowa Department of Human Services reorganized the counties into regions. Previously, each county had handled its own mental health services.

In 2018, Cerro Gordo County, Kossuth County, and Winnebago, Worth and Hancock counties (WHW) all made plans to leave CSS and join other regions.

Because regions have to be contiguous, this would have cut off Webster County from CSS and required it to join a new region — either Rolling Hills Community Services to the west, or Central Iowa Community Services to the southeast.

Webster County supervisors, along with the boards from Humboldt, Pocahontas and Wright counties, sent a letter to Cerro Gordo in September asking their board to delay leaving for a year so the counties could have more time to investigate their options.

By November, Cerro Gordo had withdrawn its plan to leave that year, and Kossuth and WHW were unable to leave. The Webster County Supervisors held a meeting to decide if Webster County would leave the region or not, with the supervisors unanimously deciding to stay where they were for the year.

“I’m concerned that this has been extremely disruptive to the employees of CSS in our region, and in our quadrant,” said county Supervisor Bob Thode in November. Thode was Webster County’s representation on the CSS board.

“We had problems, it was last year, when we ended up laying a lot of people off because we lost case management through the insurance companies. We’ve had a lot of disruption from WHW, who hasn’t made up their mind; they want to go but yet they can’t go,” Thode said.

He and some staff members said they were concerned the county would have to reduce staff if it switched to a new region.

Other Webster County supervisors said it had been hard to get information from CSS, and said more communication was needed.

“We’ve had concerns with CSS for quite a while,” Supervisor Mark Campbell said in September. “Don’t you think we should start some conversations to look at other options?”

Campbell took over as Webster County’s representative on the CSS board in January 2019.

“After the conversation we had last time, I think all the supervisors agree it’s in the best interests of the county to always look and see what are the best opportunities for the county,” Campbell said in January. “We want the best use of our mental health dollars.”

Mental health was a popular topic in the political debates this year. State Rep. Ann Meyer, R-Fort Dodge, who was elected to the state Legislature in November, said during a 2018 community forum that mental health care would be a top priority for her.

“Health care is not a party issue,” Meyer said in October. “We have too many people going untreated. … We don’t have any inpatient psych beds in our area.”

According to Meyer, people suffering from mental health crises are often released from local hospitals after three days because no proper inpatient psychiatric care can be found for them.

“I will make it a priority to open psych beds,” she said.

Throughout 2018, initiatives continued to connect jails and corrections with mental health services.

“That entails making sure we’re breaking those silos between the county criminal justice system, the state criminal justice system, and county mental health systems,” Jen Sheehan, CSS justice coordinator, said in September. “We have historically done horrible at having two separate systems. Over and over in the last five years, that’s all that’s in the news is how broken the state mental health system is, and how people are in jails or prisons that shouldn’t be, that actually have mental health needs.”

The state passed a law a few years ago to increase cooperation, and it’s made a big difference, Sheehan said.

“Webster County has honestly been going really fantastic. Credit to your sheriff’s department, your jails, it’s been a lot more welcoming than other counties, per se,” she said. “Multiple agencies within the county have done a really good job collaborating with each other.”

In particular, the nationwide “stepping up” initiative helps providers from the emergency room, the mental health clinic, and county mental health organizers coordinate with sheriff’s deputies, Fort Dodge police and jail staff.

While the program has made a difference, the challenges are still great, said Webster County Assistant Jail Administrator Shawna Dencklau, at December’s monthly meeting.

“There are a few good cases we have had where we prevented them from coming to jail, but those are few and far between. We’d like to get more of that,” she said. “It’s just difficult.”

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The Freedom Pointe peer support center opened its new Friendship Center in January in the same building as Lifeworks Community Services, 1303 A St.

Freedom Pointe, now in its third year of operation, aims to help those with mental illness by fostering connections between people. Program Coordinator Randy Hoover has spoken previously about living with borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder.

People with mental illness, he said, “have to hear it from our own kind.”

“If you have it, you know what it is,” he said. “You know what they’re going through.”

“We have helped seven people in this community leave their drug habit and go to Iowa Central. Two more went to Iowa State. One went to UNI, and one went to the University of Iowa. We have helped four people get off the streets, and living in their own apartments,” Hoover said. “We have a bag we keep, we put rocks in. There’s 11 rocks in that bag. That’s suicides we have helped prevent in the year and a half we’ve been open.”