Mental health advocates say this legislative session is the most crucial one in decades.
As the Texas Legislature faces a $9.9 billion shortfall in revenue for the next biennium, lawmakers have asked all state agencies to cut their budgets by 12.5 percent.
Members of the state's largest mental health advocacy organizations are vigorously lobbying lawmakers. They're urging them not to make drastic cuts they said will impact all Texans, especially the most vulnerable in the state.
Hundreds of people gathered at the Capitol in recent weeks fed up with being nice. They said they've tried to put a face on the dollars that could possibly be cut from mental health services.
There are faces like Pat Smith Clark from Lake Jackson. Her daughter, suffering from schizophrenia, must live in Austin to receive the proper care.
"I want her to come home. She hasn't been home in all these long years. I want Brazoria County to have some help -- Harris County, Galveston County -- all the counties, all of Texas," Clark said.
However, it doesn't look like help is on the way. Mental health care cuts currently on the table would result in a loss or reduction of services for 24,000 people with mental illnesses in Texas.
More than 50,000 would no longer be eligible for drug benefits.
The possible closure of one out of the 10 state hospitals would leave about 13,000 fewer opportunities for acute mental health care. Those who do not receive immediate need may find themselves on the street or in the criminal justice system.
"We also will see mental illness being responded to in inappropriate places – an over-utilization of our emergency rooms, homelessness, interaction with public safety and we know all too often untreated mental illness can mean that individual can find themselves in extended stays in the jails. So, these reductions will not go unnoticed while the incidents of mental illness will continue," David Evans, executive director of the Austin Travis County Mental Health Mental Retardation Center, said.
Doctors have also connected mental illness with the development of physical illness and ailments.
"Most people don't realize that psychiatric illnesses are directly tied to the body. The brain and the body, the heart, organs, the lungs, kidneys, etc. are directly tied together. In fact, there's data that shows that of the eight most common medical illnesses, seven of them occur much more commonly in people with psychiatric illnesses than otherwise," Dr. Rahn Kennedy Bailey, an in-patient psychiatrist at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston, said.
Those who receive the proper care are able to live a fully-functional and independent life.
"Mental illnesses are very treatable. Treatment success rate for mental illness range from 60 to 80 percent," Lynn Lasky, president and CEO of the Mental Health Association in Texas, said.
But, without the proper medications, a person's mental state may quickly deteriorate.
"The tragedy is when we know 90 percent of suicides are due to untreated or under-treated mental illnesses and treatment is available and they work. And so, we could be saving those people," Lasky said.
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New generation medications
Dr. Rahn Bailey discusses some of the more commonly used new generation medications and how they work.
 
Proposed cuts
State budget cuts would have a devastating effect on mental health treatment.
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Drug treatments that show promise are so-called new generation drugs. The drugs have been available for the last decade, but have really blossomed in the past five or six years, according to Bailey.
The newer medications have fewer side effects and tackle a broad spectrum of symptoms, which means they work on more than one symptom at a time, Bailey said.
Proper care worked for mental health advocate Diana Kern, who suffered with schizo-effective disorder.
"It was probably in the mid-'90s when I was put on a new medication, called new generation medication, that has worked really well," she said. "It has given me a life that I never even begun to imagine that I would have."
Though not a cure, doctors are treating mental illnesses like any other chronic illness – constant management of treatment to prevent a relapse, Bailey said.
"Think diabetes with insulin, think hypertension with hypertensive agents, think arthritis with some certain kinds of pain agents. We can manage people much better now I think.
"Certainly in my experience, where they can hopefully return to function, they can maybe be able to work where in the past they could not. Sometimes in the past our only goal with primary psychotic illness was to keep them out of jail or prison or out of the hospital and they kind of lived in a back room somewhere and stayed out of everyone's way, stayed out of trouble. Well, my experience has been very different with the newer agents," Bailey said.
However, many insurance companies refuse to pay for the newer drugs because of their higher cost. While older medications can cost a few hundred dollars per year, the newer generation medications can cost up to $2,000 per year.
"These medicines actually pay their costs back to society, I think, many times over by hopefully, preventing people who could function in a life from being on social aid -- some kind of assistance program – to being able to work, maybe and pay taxes back into the system," Bailey said.
The people who are able to live normal lives are the very same people who are trying to help change the social stigmas still held against the mentally ill -- the perception most people have of them is that the mentally ill are dangerous and beyond help.
Generally, it is the untreated cases who end up in the criminal justice system, or worse.
