MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. — A Baldwin County Commissioner is spearheading an effort to provide resources for some of Georgia’s most underserved citizens.

Ever since Henry Craig grew up around Central State Hospital, the campus that his father, James B. Craig, oversaw as superintendent during his youth, the District 4 county commissioner has witnessed a place that once was the world’s largest mental institution dwindle into a loose collection of repurposed and abandoned buildings. 

After a lifetime viewing mental illness up close and many years of Georgia’s treatment system being whittled away, Craig is using his position at the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia to explore legislative action to help bolster the state’s mental health care infrastructure.

“In the mid-1970s, 13,000 mentally ill patients were housed at the State Hospital right here in Baldwin County, and that doesn’t count the number that were institutionalized in Savannah, Thomasville, Gainesville, and other regional institutions across the State of Georgia,” said Craig, who was recently appointed chairman of the ACCG’s Standing Committee on Mental Health. “Right this minute, in the state of Georgia, there are only 500 public beds available to mental health patients. … They didn’t all just get well; most of them went to jail or they’re under a bridge. We have to find ways to allocate resources and create the systems to not let these people wind up in jail, hurting each other, or hurting us.”

In discussing mental health with other ACCG commissioners, who lobby on behalf of Georgia’s 159 county governments in its state and federal legislatures, Craig and his mental health committee members have looked extensively into the issue’s effect on local governments, with a particular focus on local law enforcement. Although no accurate count exists of the number of mental health patients in Georgia’s jails, a recent study ranked Georgia 49 out of 50 states in the number of mental health patients who receive adequate care. 

Officials with the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Department estimate that as many as 60 percent of Baldwin’s prisoners have suffered from mental illness or drug addiction, and taxpayers spent more than $150,000 on mental health drugs for local inmates last year in Baldwin County alone. The idea goes that if Georgia were to provide a larger network of public mental health facilities, the state could care for patients more efficiently than law enforcement and prevent mental illness sufferers from going undiagnosed or posing threats to other members of their communities.

“Because of current state and federal laws, the [burden] of treating those with mental illness is no longer a state or federal responsibility, it’s our responsibility as a county government,” said Craig. “[Because] we will never have the resources to treat those people as though they were ill, we are forced to treat those people through the criminal justice system. Not only is that wrong, but [it also presents a] public safety issue.”

Over several months of advocating for mental health reform in Georgia, Craig and other ACCG commissioners have started making headway even before his committee’s official introduction. Recently, members successfully lobbied the state to reverse a policy that barred criminal offenders from receiving Medicaid benefits. Under the old system, offenders were required to reapply for Medicaid after being convicted of a crime, but now offenders are only assigned a temporary suspension, preventing patients unable to afford care from going weeks or months without medication. In addition to the committee’s work on mental health, Craig plans to create a subcommittee to explore the overabundance of opioid medication in Georgia communities. The son of a former Central State Hospital Superintendent, the fact that Craig has taken an active role in combatting mental illness in Georgia comes as little surprise. 

“This is a public safety issue that we cannot continue to ignore. Somebody has to start doing something,” said Craig. “The way to handle those that are mentally ill is not through our jails and local court systems. If you have heart disease, we send you to the hospital and try to fix you. If you have cancer, we’ve been trying to find the cure. If you have a broken leg, we take you to the hospital, X-Ray you, and fix your broken leg. If you’re mentally ill, we send you to jail. … It’s a moral issue that has become a safety issue for all of us.”