At a time when society’s unmet mental-health needs have achieved unprecedented public recognition, the County Board of Supervisors got a crash course in unexpected good news from their administrators about how many new mental-health beds — the key metric for such progress — the Department of Behavioral Wellness has produced and funded over the past five years. As astonishing as even the most critical mental-health advocates agreed the progress has been, the supervisors also heard how it was still not enough.
Boiled down, the supervisors heard how in the past five years, the Department of Behavioral Wellness added 206 mental-health beds to its infrastructure of care. Another 35, the supervisors heard, are currently in development. And another 132 are still needed.
Getting a big shout-out for much of the progress was Alice Gleghorn, the often-embattled former mental-health director who took over a department on the brink of collapse. At the beginning of her tenure, Gleghorn — who stepped down earlier this year — and her staff took an inventory of all the mental-health beds from most to least restrictive and found them severely lacking.