One in five adults in the United States will be affected by mental illness, either directly or through a friend or family member.

This is according to Harold White. He and his wife Nancy, natives of Brookhaven, returned last year after living several years in Tennessee, partially to help care for Nancy’s brothers who suffer from mental illness.

“We made the decision that we would not only try to help them, but to try and help all those people in Mississippi — and the families as well,” White said.

White will be attending a state-wide conference for the National Alliance on Mental Health in Jackson Thursday and Friday.

“There are speakers who are presenting various aspects of what will hopefully be developments and progress in the treatment in the state of the mentally ill,” White said. “Such as residential options or dealing with the mentally ill that are incarcerated. There’s a big drive to improve the access to treatment programs for youth and for veterans.

“Because so much of this is tied into various state laws and programs, there’s always a legislative session where there’s discussion about various initiatives that are advanced or cut or maintained. That’s the general purpose of the conference — to bring people together about what is being done, what should be done to improve the plight of the mentally ill in this society.”

The Department of Mental Health, like most state agencies, are also facing budget cuts this year. The department announced Tuesday that it would be shutting down the 42-bed chemical dependency unit at Mississippi State Hospital in Rankin County, a 29-bed acute medical psychiatric unit at the same hospital and the 25-bed male chemical dependency unit at East Mississippi State Hospital in Meridian.

But there are more problems in Mississippi than just budget woes. White said there are a multitude of issues faced by the mentally ill that need to be addressed by the community.

Harold and Nancy are on the advisory board for a Program of Assertive Community Treatment Teams. NAMI said the teams can reduce hospitalizations by 20 percent, but those benefits won’t come without the proper resources. Harold White said, of the eight PACT teams in the state, two cannot find a permanent psychiatric nurse practitioner or psychiatrist.

“These teams have been used very successfully in other states for 30 years, but they’re still fairly new to Mississippi,” White said. “It takes a lot of infrastructure and support for this to happen.”

White said he was puzzled by the difficulty in finding medical personnel in the PACT Teams, but he acknowledged that the job required a good deal of dedication.

“On a PACT Team, the team members go to the client,” White said. “They literally go to where the person lives. That’s what they call assertive community treatment. Not every medical person is going to want to do that. I think that’s a part of the issue. You have to find the person that has the right kind of heart for doing it. It’s not an easy thing to find.”

White said the key to a good mental health recovery is early treatment — something that’s not always easy to find in Mississippi.

“Studies show that people progress and recover much more rapidly the more quickly they get into treatment,” he said. “Even the first visit is really delayed in many parts of the state because of lack of proper medical personnel.”