Vasquez, community leaders discuss mental health concerns in Valencia County

LOS LUNAS—From individuals to society, as a whole, the impact of mental health — or lack of resources — is immense.

Yet, it remains a topic that is often overlooked and underfunded, especially in more rural communities, such as Valencia County.

Hoping to spark some discussion on the issue and learn about what resources exist and are needed, U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, representing New Mexico’s second congressional district, hosted a county-wide mental health and services roundtable on April 25 in partnership with the Valencia Wellness Council.

The discussion, which took place in Los Lunas Transportation Center, had about 20 people in attendance ranging from local government officials, school district personnel and more.

Camille Griego, who works with Los Lunas Schools’ McKinney-Vento program, said one of the biggest needs she sees is a lack of emergency behavioral health services.

Within Los Lunas, Deputy Village Administrator Erin Callahan said there is not a dedicated department responsible for behavioral health, so usually it’s first responders who end up dealing with someone experiencing a mental health crisis.

Knowing this, Los Lunas Councilor Gino Romero said more consistent training is needed for first responders, including police and firefighters, on how to best approach these situations.

“I think that’s important because if they’re the first line of community members that deal with them on a consistent basis, I think that would really help to find funding for training,” Romero said.

Vasquez said Albuquerque has a system in place where they have a dedicated mental health professional on staff who work with law enforcement and public safety officials to teach them how to deal with mental health issues in a community. He said if a similar position is created within Valencia County, his office can likely help fund and support it.

“Sometimes folks are reluctant to do that because it’s a new way of handling these cases that’s not just crime-based, but kind of psychology-based, but that’s something we’re happy to help with,” said Vasquez.

Since many people experiencing homelessness also struggle with mental health issues, Callahan noted that Valencia County is experiencing a large, growing problem.

“We have been working a little bit with Rep. Stansbury’s office, also with Valencia County and Belen, to propose that it might be time to do an updated housing and homelessness assessment that would give us some better data, just because the problem has changed so much in the last few years,” Callahan said.

Deborah Baca, the health services coordinator for Belen Consolidated Schools, shared some ways BCS is addressing mental health as well as some struggles.

“I understand when you say there’s no place to send these kids,” Baca said. “We deal with a lot of suicide ideations and, believe it or not, it’s not primarily in the secondary schools, it’s primarily in elementary.”

Baca said within the last few years, BCS has been able to ramp up the mental health services through working with Central Regional and Educational Cooperative, who was recently awarded a $5 million federal grant.

“We’re benefiting now from the social workers that they’ve hired,” said Baca. “We’re able to provide social workers now at several of our schools, and we’re providing this for our regular education kids, too.”

Baca said the three social workers they hired visit the Belen Middle School and two of their elementary schools weekly. Baca said they are also working to provide mental health resources to parents as well, so they can be more proactive in their children’s mental health as well as their own.

“The parent guidance organization is a free app to all parents. There’s all these free webinars; they can do one on how do I deal with my child who’s having suicidal thoughts, or how do I deal with my child who’s being bullied, or things like that,” Baca said. “We also signed up for the clinical therapist online where parents can get three or four sessions.”

Baca said BCS has also been doing a lot of staff training related to mental health and they will be hosting live webinars throughout the year addressing a variety of mental health related topics. For more information, visit beleneagles.org.

“I think the biggest thing that we all face here in Valencia County is there’s a handful of providers that you can send them out to and they’re overwhelmed,” Baca concluded. “Do we have the fix? We absolutely don’t. We’re like everybody else; we struggle and we all know that we lack very much, not just in behavioral health, but we are lacking a lot of health services here in the county.”

Community Wellness Council coordinator Pamela Skinner wanted to remind folks about the CWC resource directory that shows health and wellness services in the area all in one place. The resource directory can be found online at resourcesvalencianm.org.

Yolanda Abeita, the truancy department manager for the Pueblo of Isleta, said a lot of families and students struggle with mental health and while they have a behavioral health program, there are not any youth counselors.

“This is very unfortunate because we’ve made visits to (local high schools) with tribal administration and the students have stated, I’m concerned about my friend’s mental health and the students who are struggling are telling their peer ‘I need help’ but that’s not the role of the student,” she said.

Abeita also said more parents need to acknowledge mental health and be someone their children can approach about mental health concerns because “if we don’t have that family buy-in, then the youth are, ‘Well, I guess it’s not a problem, so I should just keep my mouth shut.’”

After hearing from everyone in attendance, Vasquez advised them to look into creating a more formalized plan for helping to address mental health issues within the community.

“This allows the federal government to advocate on behalf of the grants that you all submit, because they’re part of a larger plan that your community wants to see to address those specific issues,” he said.

Vasquez acknowledged the shortage of medical practitioners in the community and this is something other communities in his district struggle with as well.

“We have to be able to get more doctors, more practitioners here and be able to pay our folks well and provide more incentives for people to come and live in places like Los Lunas and Belen,” said Vasquez. “This is something we’re working on, and we’ve got several pieces of legislation to address just that which we have introduced from conversations in other rural communities.”

“More than anything, I just want to express my gratitude for all the work that you all do,” Vasquez concluded. “These aren’t easy jobs, and just know that you have a partner in our office.”