Mental Health

Mobile crisis teams are struggling. These are the teams of mental health professionals that respond to behavioral health calls instead of police. Those programs don’t have reliable funding, and the teams that remain say they need help.

Montana’s top attorney will lead the Republican effort to elect more conservative attorneys general next year. State officials are looking for a site in Laurel to build a new mental health facility for criminal defendants.

Montana Health officials have selected Laurel as location for a new $26.5 million state mental health treatment facility. The health department was looking for a location in the eastern portion of the state. The facility is intended to help address a backlog at the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs.

Plans for a new mental health facility in eastern Montana are advancing. Deer Lodge County proposes two sites for a new women's prison. An Idaho man has been charged with running a Ponzi scheme that allegedly defrauded several elderly Montanans.

People living in southwest Montana have long struggled to find care when they experience a mental health crisis. They often drove for hundreds of miles to get help. A new facility is opening to serve those patients.

The state psychiatric hospital has a new CEO. This will be the fifth leader of the embattled facility in the past four years.

State lawmakers have overridden Gov. Greg Gianforte’s veto of a bill that will pay county jails for holding inmates awaiting space at the state psychiatric hospital.

The Montana State Hospital lost its federal certification in 2022 due to patient deaths. That decertification means the state can’t bill Medicaid or Medicare for patient services – a funding loss that has cost the state millions of dollars. State health officials plan to apply for federal recertification next year.

Big changes are on the horizon for Montana’s mental and behavioral health system. Lawmakers this year made major policy changes and investments into what many have called a broken system.

Southwest Montana will soon have an inpatient psychiatric unit for adults. The facility will be the only one of its kind in the region.