A PLAN TO GUT MENTAL HEALTH

NEWSDAY
April 21, 2009, p. A34
A plan to gut mental health

More middle-class families are in need of mental health services ["More seek help in stressful time," News, April 20]. Yet, the New York State Office of Mental Health has a plan that is a blueprint for the destruction of children's community-based mental health services in the suburbs.

The OMH plan - called Transforming New York's Mental Health System - is dramatically skewed in favor of supporting services for families with Medicaid-only insurance coverage. That means it discriminates against the middle- and lower-middle-class and working-poor families that are underinsured or uninsured.

At the North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center these kinds of families represent almost 75 percent of those seeking our help.

The answer is for Nassau County and New York State to join to restore and enhance local assistance funding - a partnership between local and state government, the local community and the consumer of mental health services.

Andrew Malekoff

Long Beach

Editor's note: The writer is executive director for North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center in Roslyn Heights.