A year after big gift, youth mental health initiative for Evansville moving ahead

EVANSVILLE − It’s been more than a year since Bill Stone, founder of SS&C Technologies and frequent benefactor to his hometown, and his wife Mary announced a $34 million gift to a youth mental health initiative at the Indiana University School of Medicine-Evansville.

Little has been said publicly about the effort since then. Behind the scenes, discussion has focused on how to get the greatest value from Stone's philanthropy. Officials' goal is to create a mental health services delivery model in Evansville that's emulated across the state and nation.

It won’t happen fast, said Dr. Steve Strakowski, who in April 2022 became executive director of what’s being called the Mary O’Daniel & Bill Stone Center for Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

In fact, Strakowski described it as a decade-long endeavor, at least. But he said he’s committed to making it happen, and so will other professionals who come on board in 2023 and beyond.

There doesn't seem to be any doubt about the need.

According to 2017-18 data from the National Survey of Children's Health, 28% of Indiana residents ages 12-17 have a mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioral issue.

State data from 2018 showed 31.6 Indiana adolescents per 10,000 had been hospitalized for major depressive disorders. That was the leading cause for inpatient hospitalization, followed by depression (14.2 per 10,000) and bipolar disorders (13.1 per 10,000).

IU hired Strakowski from the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School. He’s visited Evansville, but he lives in Indianapolis. A recently hired associate director, Dr. Julianne Marie Giust, is based in Evansville.

“I got put in place, (Giust) got put in place, and we put together a steering committee to put some shape around the gift,” Strakowski told the Courier & Press in a Zoom interview. “There was a general idea of what (the new initiative) might be, but it wasn’t specifically defined. We started working together on what would be the best use of these funds.”

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The initiative is based at the Stone Family Center for Health Sciences, the Downtown facility where IU School of Medicine-Evansville relocated in 2018. At first, the steering committee considered establishing a large research portal at Stone Center, complete with imaging technology.

However, “we saw that wouldn’t be possible in a city that size,” Strakowski said. “It’s not a criticism of Evansville, it’s just those things just take hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure. That part of it will be in Indianapolis. But we really wanted to commit to something that would make a change in Evansville.”

What will evolve here over time, Strakowski said, is emphasis on educational programming for people who work in mental health fields and embracing a “team” approach to service delivery.

He said simply hiring “a bunch of psychiatrists” isn’t practical, nor the best approach to youth mental health care.

He said researchers within the new initiative will work with Evansville providers such as Deaconess Health System, Ascension St. Vincent Health System and others “to start designing a model mental health community."

“We want to use the existing infrastructure of Evansville, design new models of care delivery to meet as much of the youth mental health need as we can within the current structure … then use the research and demonstration projects -- and that’s what this money will be supporting -- to change how health care is funded in Indiana to allow a better and broader coverage of services,” Strakowski said.

Strakowski's to-do list in 2023 includes hiring a program manager and a resident director, who would be based in Evansville.

He said Giust is already working with local health systems on hiring and making shorter-term improvements to service delivery, while keeping in mind the goal of longer-term, research-centered solutions.

“Once we start making progress and come up with better models of care delivery, we would of course share those around the state," Strakowski said. "If this is successful, the Stone Center will be a national if not international leader in, working within a mid-sized city to create a model of mental health care that gives optimal outcomes and can be sustained financially over time."

The Stone family's gift to the youth mental health initiative isn't a lump sum, Strakowski noted; it will come over a period of years. Strakowski said he's spoken with Bill Stone, who lives in Florida, about what the initiative will seek to accomplish.

In addition to the Stone family's gift, the initiative also was named recently as the recipient of $2 million from Indiana's READI economic stimulus program.

Strakowski said some good mental health care infrastructure exists in Evansville − he mentioned the two large healthcare companies as well as nonprofits such as Youth First.

He said the Mary O’Daniel & Bill Stone Center for Child & Adolescent Psychiatry will strive to build upon that foundation.

"Now, it's just a matter of getting people on the ground and moving forward," Strakowski said.

Steering committee members

The Mary O’Daniel & Bill Stone Center for Child & Adolescent Psychiatry steering committee has a mix of local and state health care professionals. They are:

• Dr. Steve Strakowski, Professor and Vice Chair, IUSM Department of Psychiatry; Exec Director

• Dr. Steve Becker, Associate Dean, IUSM-Evansville

• Dr. Leslie Hulvershorn, Associate Professor and Chair, IUSM Department of Psychiatry

• Dr. James Porter, President, Deaconess Health

• Dr. Maria del Rio, Medical Director, Ascension Center for Children

• Dr. Bill Tierney, Associate Dean, IU School of Public Health

• Gil Perry, CEO Riley Hospital

• Tyler Leishman, Chief Strategy Officer, Riley Hospital

• Dr. Himanshu Shah, President, IU Health Physicians

• Tatiana Faroud, Vice Dean of Research, IUSM

• Dr. John Nurnberger, Emeritus Professor, IUSM Dept of Psychiatry

• Dr. Mark Browning, Adjunct Clinical Professor, IUSM-E

• William Kronenberger, Professor and Director of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, IUSM

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: New Evansville youth mental health initiative moving forward, slowly