From the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin offering a mental health resources page to the San Antonio Public Library’s mental health awareness presentation on the signs of anxiety to a private telehealth room where patrons can meet with a counselor via Zoom in North Texas town of Pottsboro, these librarians do their best to help their communities with mental health resources.
The National Library of Medicine’s South Central Region gave the Pottsboro Area Library a $20,000 COVID-19 outreach grant to develop programs to improve health literacy and information access related to the pandemic. In 2021, the American Library Association awarded the Hewitt Public Library a $3,000 grant to create community conversations about mental health.
And more recently, the St. David Foundation, a grantmaking organization for Central Texas, and its partners, Via Hope, a mental health nonprofit, and RAND, a research organization, allocated $1.5 million to eight Central Texas libraries as part of a three-year pilot program that will end in December.
The pilot program is designed to allow mental health programs to flow seamlessly into the library’s community service model. The peer specialist training program provided the initial training for certification using a federal grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration.
This new resources have allowed rural libraries to pitch in and help address the growing mental health need in their communities.
Texas is a state where 98 percent of its 254 counties are designated as Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas, areas where there’s only 1 clinician for 30,000 residents, and the state’s behavioral health worker shortage is expected to grow.
This workforce shortage has prevented private and state-run mental health hospitals from operating at total capacity, created long waitlists for therapy services, and forced many private providers from taking on new clients as the demand has exceeded scheduling capacity.
Elsewhere in Texas, libraries are finding more ways to help their patrons stay healthier.
South of Waco, the Hewitt Public Library has tapped American Library Association funds to create mental health kits, including stress balls and fidget spinners. In far North Texas, the Pottsboro Public Library, located near the Oklahoma border, used funds from the National Library of Medicine’s South Central Region to create a telehealth room for physical and mental health appointments.
Lawmakers have attempted to address the mental health workforce problem in non-metro areas since 70% of Texas counties are rural by incentivizing mental health providers to practice in remote areas and expanding telehealth. However, this is a long-term measure and won’t fix the crisis in the short term.
To address this need, libraries have started to get creative with the resources available to them to continue their role as community centers where people can go and find resources on housing, employment, substance abuse services, and mental health.
Read more at TexasTribune.org.
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