Labette Center Receives Grant for My Family Labette Program

Labette Center for Mental Health Services (LCMHS) has become a recipient for a grant that will allow the Center to provide a new service to Labette County residents.  The grant, which has been awarded by U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration and the support of the Kan­sas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE), will provide the Center with funding to begin the My Family Labette Program, which is a Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program for families within Labette County. 

The purpose of this program is to provide families a centralized process that will identify family's needs and wants, and connect them to community resources and services.   "I am excited that LCMHS is able to be a part of a program that is only offered in three other counties in Kansas.  Our My Family Resource Specialist will be able to outreach to families in our community so that they are more aware of the services available." stated Misti Mustain, Director of Specialty Services at Labette Center for Mental Health.  The My Family Program assists families with children birth to five years of age, as well as women who are pregnant, to assure they have the education, skills, resources, and opportunities to succeed. This is a collaborative effort with Early Head Start, Healthy Families American, and Parents as Teachers programs. 

Andrea Bray has been named the Resource Specialist for the program.  She began working in the program on February 11^th.  Bray, and the My Family Labette program, will have an office located at 1715 Corning.  She will spend time seeing clients in both the office, in the community and during visits to homes.

“It is exciting to be able to provide these services to the people of Labette County.” stated Matthew Atteberry, Executive Director of Labette Center for Mental Health.  “We look forward working with clients and helping them get connected with the services they need.”

For more information on the My Family Labette program, please call 620-421-3770.  Individuals may also visit our website at http://www.lcmhs.com/My-Family-Labette-64056.asp.

Op-Ed from Matthew M. Atteberry, LSCSW, Executive Director of Labette Center for Mental Health Services

Currently in America, there have been a variety of issues that have taken place involving our schools and our children.    Situations such as the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut or the incident that took place on a bus in Alabama have brought a number of issues to the forefront of all of our minds.  We all want there to be a means through which an individual can be stopped before committing atrocities like these.  However, the research shows, "Although it is possible to make a general assessment of relative risk, it is impossible to predict an individual, specific act of violence. . ." (Harvard Medical School Mental Health Letter, Mental Illness and Violence, January 2011).  The article reports, “Most individuals with psychiatric disorders are not violent” and there are multiple interacting factors contributing to violent behavior, which includes a person’s past history of violence, substance use, the nature of the person’s symptoms, age and gender. 

There are a multitude of factors that can fit into these categories.   Young people are more likely than older adults to act violently and men are more likely than women to act violently.  Personal stress, crisis, or loss of employment, divorce, or separation in the past year increases a person’s risk of violence. Early exposure to violence can create risk factors for violent tendencies.  The risk of violence rises with exposure to aggressive family fights during childhood, physical abuse by a parent, or having a parent with a criminal record. 

If you are reading this and saying, “I know people who experienced these type of things, either now or in the past, and they have never been a risk to anyone,” you have just identified the difficulty, and the present impossibility, of making an accurate prediction with complete certainty about who will commit a violent act at any given point beyond the imminent future.

H.L. Mencken, American journalist and essayist, said, “There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong."  As a country, state, and community, we must commit to developing strategies that will reduce violence in America, strategies that are evidence based when possible, thoughtful enough to avoid “neat, plausible, and wrong,” effective, and that simultaneously insure that all citizens’ civil rights are fully protected.

This current state of predictive inability does not leave us without recourse.  The article cited above also calls out, “Adequate treatment of mental illness and substance abuse may help reduce rates of violence.”  A fully and adequately funded behavioral health care system can be, and is part of, the solution to violence in America.  The renewed focus on this issue by President Obama, and in Kansas by Gov. Brownback, is attention I hope we all will welcome and embrace.