Grand Forks may send COVID aid to mental health coalition – Grand Forks Herald

City Council members are set to consider next month a plan that would set aside $300,000 of the $5.86 million the city has been allotted from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act to help Mental Health Matters, a group of government and health workers that aims to improve mental health services in the region, get off the ground. The city would pay $100,000 each year for a yet-to-be-hired manager for the program and assorted programming ideas and equipment.

Each of the groups members has a day job, so to speak, in mental health, which means that devoting yet more energy, especially during the pandemic, to Mental Health Matters is a tall order.

We were all doing our best to come together monthly and as needed kind of throughout our time, but someone to drive that work forward full time would, we think, make all the difference in the world, said David Terry, the project coordinator for Mountain Plains Mental Health Technology Transfer Center and a member of Mental Health Matters planning committee.

A coordinator would help promote existing mental health services and would collect data that could form the basis for policy changes down the road, according to Terry.

I think that having someone who gets up every day and can focus on that would really be able to turn that wheel and start getting things moving forward, Terry said.

The 10-person committee has put together a website -- gfcares.com -- that lists therapists, psychiatrists and other mental health workers contact information, as well as links to a list of food banks and a collection of articles that offer help at the intersection of mental health and COVID-19, such as a guide to coping with stress during the pandemic published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Committee members also organized a kickoff event shortly before the virus curtailed nearly every facet of everyday life.

The planning committee started meeting in January 2019, shortly after the conclusion of a year in which a particularly high number of Grand Forks residents died by suicide. Beyond that, a CDC study found that, from 1999 to 2016, North Dakotans killed themselves at a rate higher than people in any other state in the country, and a community health assessment conducted in 2019 found that 57% of Grand Forks residents are very concerned about suicide attempts, and 53% are very concerned about depression.

Mental Health Matters goal is to make Grand Forks an emotionally healthy city where people receive the help they need to thrive and succeed.

Examples of the kind of work the organization aims to do include the access for all scholarships at Northern Prairie Community Clinic, which aim to help Grand Forks residents find and receive affordable mental health care. Others include getting more people trained in mental health first aid that would teach them the warning signs of a mental health crisis, how and when to help, and so on. A similar operation in Fargo -- ReThink Mental Health -- has representatives from businesses across the city regularly attend mental health trainings, then relay what they learned to their coworkers.

How do we take ideas like that and expand on those? Geoff Gaukler, Grand Forks Public Schools mental health coordinator and a member of Mental Health Matters planning committee, asked rhetorically.

More broadly, Gaukler said, the hope is to move more mental health care upsteam, meaning further from the point at which it would be an emergency.

The reality is all of us have ups and downs, and, at some point in time, we're all going to have a mental health challenge, right? Even if you don't have a diagnosis, we're all going to have challenges, Gaukler told the Herald. And so how do we help people build their skills to prepare for those challenges so they don't become more serious and don't become a crisis?

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Grand Forks may send COVID aid to mental health coalition - Grand Forks Herald