By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay is on a mission to address the need for more mental health and addiction recovery resources in the area.
According to Zahilay, there is a “Shadow Pandemic” taking place right now. Yes, there’s the COVID-19 pandemic that everybody was thinking about, talking about, and at the forefront of the media, but in the background, there is this shadow pandemic of record mental health issues and record overdoses. This is why Zahilay proposed a $1.25 billion Crisis Care Centers Levy to build more places for people to go when they’re in crisis.
“The biggest piece of legislation I have worked on in my four years on the King Council is an initiative that I ran called the Crisis Care Center Levy,” says Zahilay. “The reason why is the mental health and addiction crisis have ravaged our communities.”
According to King County health officials, there is a growing number of people in the streets who are suffering from substance use disorders, from using fentanyl and opioids, to those who suffer from schizophrenia and other psychological issues that are going untreated.
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“When I started asking why this is happening, part of the reason is we just don’t have enough of a recovery infrastructure in our region,” says Zahilay. “By recovery infrastructure, I mean a phone number to call if you are in crisis, a mobile crisis responder to drive out to you and help, and a crisis care center, a building for you to go to get the care that you need.”
In a region of 2.3 million people, King County only has one 46-bed facility for urgent crisis care stabilization. Imagine if you are going through an urgent behavioral health issue and you need to go somewhere to be dropped off or taken by a family member to get care, the county only has one facility that, in the overall scheme of things, can only manage a handful of people needing care and assistance.
“When you think about long-term care, not just immediate stabilizing care, but for the long-term care, what are called ‘long-term residential mental health beds,’ we used to have 500-plus in the 1990s, and then by 2019 we had 355 beds and by 2021 we had 244-plus beds,” says Zahilay. “The number of those beds has been declining every single year.”
“At the same time, we have seen record overdoses every year over the past few years and mental health issues with young people,” he continued. “Those are elevating at an alarming rate. We need a phone line, mobile crisis responders to drive out to you the same way an ambulance does for physical injuries, and we need urgent care facilities for mental health. If you break a bone in King County, you have plenty of urgent care options, but if you have a mental breakdown or an extreme substance abuse disorder, you have almost no options.”
Zahilay’s proposal, which was approved by voters last spring, will create five crisis care centers in King County, increase the long-term residential health bed capacity, and support the mental health and addiction workforce. The levy will also support the nurses and the service providers in this field, who are experiencing record numbers of vacancies and burnouts.
In addition to those long-term strategies, the plan also proposes priority strategies to quickly fund early crisis services that can go into effect before crisis care centers are built and operational, including:
• Expand mobile crisis services.
• Embed behavioral health counselors in 911 call centers.
• Expand access to opioid overdose reversal medication.
• Capital facility funding to expand substance use services.
• Preserve existing residential treatment facility capacity and build new capacity.
• Invest in behavioral health workforce development and career pathways like training and recruiting.
“We put this initiative on the ballot, and last April the public voted yes,” says Zahilay enthusiastically. “Now we are at the point of creating an implementation plan.”
“So, the public voted yes, and now the King County Executive has transmitted to the King County Council a plan,” continued Zahilay. “This is how the money is going to be spent, this is where the crisis centers will be located, this is the process for releasing RFP (request for proposals) to get the service providers to staff these areas, so that detailed plan is before us right now. We are going to be reviewing that over the next month to determine how we actually implement this vision.”
