As a mental health professional, I am appalled that the governing forces in our great Commonwealth of VA find it necessary to further restrict/ or end services for the mentally ill who genuinely need and benefit from skill-building services. As evidenced more and more in VA and nationwide in the past years and months, mental health cannot be an afterthought-it must be a preventative set of services in place so these tragedies don't occur.

With these new regulations, mentally ill clients who are currently receiving skill building services and  living independently while working on bettering their lives, are going to lose the only support that they know, will de-compensate, and will end up in our jails or in our psychiatric hospitals costing the Commonwealth much more than if they continued to receive skill-building services in the first place! We don't need more mentally ill people incarcerated, as our jails are overcrowded now and they cannot receive the help they need there; they will not receive any medications or psychiatric care in jail and when released, will only repeat this pattern over and over because now they are un-medicated, have no place to live, and have no skill-building services. And if they are hospitalized after losing skill building services, the cost to the Commonwealth for that individual's psychiatric hospital for just one day alone is astronomical!

The bottom line is that VA needs to enforce the policies that are already in place and crack down on providers that aren't already following the set guidelines. The mentally ill population of Virginia depends on these services and shouldn't be treated like second-class citizens. Stand up Virginia-we ARE better than being 48th in the nation for mental health care!