When she saw the headline about a father throwing his 5-year-old daughter off the Dick Misener Bridge Thursday morning, State Rep. Kathleen Peters (R-South Pasadena) figured something beyond malice was at play. As more heart-wrenching details came forth, such as the fact that Phoebe Jonchuck was still alive when it happened, it became painfully clear to Peters, who has made tackling Florida's psychological care woes her mission in Tallahassee.Since the initial shocking news about what John Jonchuck did to his daughter early Thursday morning, the trickle of details chronicling the years, days and hours leading up to Phoebe's death point to a long history of mental health issues that could have served as a warning, some say, if only someone had kept an eye out.
“There's too many things that happened in this case that slipped through the cracks,” Peters said.
She points to several other disturbing cases that have happened in Tampa Bay and other parts of the state in recent months as evidence that Florida isn't doing enough to care for and monitor mentally ill individuals before their actions turn deadly: the man who decapitated his mother in Oldsmar; the woman in Daytona who drove a minivan full of her children into the Atlantic Ocean; an Avila father who killed his family and set the house on fire before killing himself.
It's hard to know where exactly the system went wrong, or why these people weren't properly treated before their conditions proved deadly for themselves and those they love, Peters says, because there are so many gaps in Florida's approach to mental health care.
Florida, after all, is 49th in the nation when it comes to per capita mental healthcare spending, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“The barrier to accessing care is statewide,” said Karen Koch, vice president of the Florida Council for Community Mental Health, who was quoted in a May 19, 2014 Jacksonville Times-Union editorial.
Peters said she spent much of last summer gathering information on the state's mental healthcare system, touring hospitals and jails, interviewing judges and other professionals, and found too many issues to count.
A major one? Staffing.
“What I've learned is, there's a huge workforce shortage within this arena," she said.
Many public programs and nonprofits can't pay social workers what insurance companies do, so vacancies don't get filled as quickly. Florida Department of Children and Families Secretary Mike Carroll said fewer than 90 percent of DCF vacancies are being filled. Peters said she thinks this could be remedied with student loan forgiveness for social workers who chose to work for such organizations despite the lower salary.
Another possible fix, she said, could be to provide crisis intervention training to police officers so they can identify the signs of potential danger. Some deputies within the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office have already undergone such training.
Peters said solving Florida's mental health woes is going to take years, and urged caution against acting hastily in the wake of especially horrific crimes.
“My goal is to come up with a five-year plan that will truly address [mental health],” she said. “I don't want to do a knee-jerk Band-aid that isn't going to be effective or will make things worse.”
"The reasons why children are dying are complex, and we only touch a fraction of the kids that are dying," Carroll said. "But nonetheless, we have a responsibility to understand what's going on and to eliminate [the fatalities]. Almost always there's a chronic substance-abuse issue, sometimes a mental-health issue, sometimes a domestic-violence issue. Those three factors are driving everything we do in the department."