New Executive Takes the Chair at Mental Health

Would you stop in for a routine check up for your mental health? Jim Novelli is a firm believer that mental health needs more attention and that Eastern Montana has many challenges because of it’s size and the diverse needs.

Novelli is the new Chief Executive Officer for Eastern Montana Mental Health Community Center. He said that figuring out how to get the right services into the right places and how to maintain services, with finding potential to increase services in the areas it’s needed, will be a focus. He started working in February and said he spent the first two and a half months surveying the needs of the 17 eastern counties they cover.

“Each town has unique prospects and there are similar needs for mental health,” Novelli said. “How do we make a crisis service and become more accessible and be there when needed?”

Novelli, who originally came from New Jersey still holds a slight accent. But he spent the last two decades in rural Illinois working in mental health as the executive director for a region on the southern tip of the state that covered 26 counties. He said that he also covered Eastern St. Louis as part of his region.

He didn’t immediately work in mental health out of college. He actually worked for 10 years in anthropology, but after a life changing event, he thought he would be a counselor to students, but he found that he loved crisis counseling and that fueled him to continue.

Making the transition to rural Montana wasn’t a big jump for Novelli, but he said that being on a frontier type setting and learning logistics has had its own challenges. Crisis care has been at the top of his list.

He said that they are considering different options to establish a crisis location. The Glendive location will be taking in-house patents only and will be closing for six months. He said that looking at the numbers in crisis situations and the logistics on the eastern side will come into play on the final decision on where to place something for crisis patients.

He added that it will take funding to build, to collaborate and to staff a place that will need 24-7 coverage, and that the numbers are showing a demand for a crisis center. He said that finding the right staffing and getting them properly trained would be the challenge they faced later down the road.

“These are all the pieces that fit together,” Novelli said. “We hope to build on what’s successful and then maybe look at what’s next.”

Novelli explained that a mental health crisis is when someone can no longer perform daily functions in their daily life, it could be someone battling depression, dealing with suicidal thoughts are sometimes people who are dealing with addictions and other issues. Crisis counselors often can determine what level a client is at and help match them up with services that will work best with the individual. Sometimes a patient program is a better solution than going to a crisis location.

One of the issues on the eastern side of the state is the lack of crisis centers, Novelli said that there are three to four locations on the western side, but hopefully more funding could come to this side of the state, something he said that community support could help sway legislature.

Currently the regional office in Eastern Montana is in Miles City, but there is outreach in each community and there are offices in Plentywood, Wolf Point, Sidney, Glendive, Forsyth, Baker, Colstrip, Scobey, Malta, Broadus and in Glasgow.

For more information on local mental health services you can visit the web at http://www.emcmhc.org, or call 406-228-9349.