BY ANDY GARDNER

North Country This Week

CANTON -- The St. Lawrence County legislature’s Operations Committee passed a resolution to spend $50,960 on tele-psychiatry services, after a discussion where legislators said they want more information on mental health and chemical dependency services.

The county needs to contract for the service because a psychiatrist went down to working one day per week.

Jason Ulrich, St. Lawrence County’s director of community services, is asking the legislature to approve the contract with the Family Counseling Center in Gloversville for a psychiatric nurse practitioner who can perform those duties for now. Ulrich said the proposal is just one option to fill the need and they are also looking for in-house solutions. The proposal would have to be voted on by the full Board of Legislators to be made official.

If the full board ratifies the contract, appointments would be done via telemedicine, meaning a video chat. Patients with smartphones or smart tablets would be able to get an app to do the appointments from their homes, Ulrich said.

Legislator Joe Lightfoot, R-Ogdensburg, wanted to know if patients would be better off seeing a provider in person.

"Is face-to-face a better way of providing those services?” Lightfoot asked.

"For the younger clients that have grown up with technology, it doesn't bother them as much,” Ulrich said.

Legislator John Burke, R-Norfolk, said he wants to see data showing how the county is doing in treating substance abuse and mental illness. Burke said he wants to see "data we can wrap our arms around, how are we doing in the fight against opioid addiction? How are we doing with mental illness?"

"Some of the charts I've looked at, they capture housing, they capture a number of other dynamics in the community. I'm wondering where is the community services board with that assessment,” Burke said.

Ulrich said they can look at the number of patients coming in, but that won’t necessarily tell them what’s out there untreated.

"One of the things you try to use for that assessment is wait times, or wait lists. I've reached out to all the chemical dependency providers and they have wait times of one week or less,” Ulrich said. He believes the county has a "fairly substantial capacity for substance abuse services.”

He said mental health numbers can be even trickier to capture.

"It's difficult to get wait times for mental health clinics ... there's more stigma associated with it … mental health, for whatever reason, is still rather closed,” Ulrich said. "In 2017, we were certainly above the state average for opioid abuse disorder, emergency room visits and hospitalizations.”