Dr. Carole Myers
Welcome to Health Connections, the show about people health and policy. I'm Dr Carol Myers. The Tennessee General Assembly reconvenes on January 13. In late December, I sat down with State Senator Richard Briggs to record the annual legislative update. Senator Briggs shared his perspective on key issues affecting the state. We discussed three topics: the status of the freestanding mental health hospital in the Knoxville area, an update on the opioid crisis in Tennessee and the affordability of healthcare.
Please provide an update on the new freestanding mental health hospital in the Knoxville area. We talked about this last year.
Senator Richard Briggs
Yes, we did, and I've had a lot of questions from both citizens and the media on this. We're very happy to report that when the commissioner of mental health did her budget presentation to the governor, she's asked for $20 million. It's not actually the free standing mental hospital that we're really looking for, which will be much more expensive than that, but at the emPATH facility that's run by Helen Ross McNabb, this is the old outpatient surgery building. It's at the St Mary's Hospital there on woodland on the second floor. They're going to use those funds to convert that to a 30-bed inpatient facility where they can hold patients more than just overnight or 72 hours. So this will add substantially to our inpatient psychiatric beds in the community, but it's still not the freestanding mental hospital that we really need for Middle Tennessee and Knoxville,
But it's progress for a very serious problem in our community.
We're delighted that this is being done now. It hasn't passed the legislature, it hasn't been accepted to the governor's budget, but this is certainly we're on the right path by that's being requested by the commissioner of mental health.
Let's look now at the opioid crisis in Tennessee and where we're at, where we've made progress from, where we have warning signs.
You know, that's a very good question. It was just two years ago, if you look nationally, that we had around 110,000 deaths from drug overdose. This had been increasing yearly for the last 15 years. The good news is finally, in 2024, it looks like that's starting to plateau. And on a national level, the number of deaths actually decreased. So that's good news. However, we still have way too many overdose deaths. It contributes to crime. If you talk to our sheriff, he may very well say that if someone breaks into your home, breaks into your car, they're trying to steal something to buy drugs. I would like to add that I had a meeting with the administration of the East Tennessee Children's Hospital, and I asked, "Are we still seeing the babies that are born withdrawing from opiates due to their mother's use?" And the answer is, we're not hearing as much about it. Those babies are there. They're still having to deal with that every day. So we're still dealing with the opiate crisis as much as we would like to, and we are making progress because with the opiate abatement funds that came from some of these large settlements with drug companies and the pharmacies and some of those. We do have rehab programs that are in place. Those are very successful, but we continue to need to drop and to educate people not to get on the drugs in the first place, because it's very expensive to ever rehabilitate them and get them off the drugs with all these other social problems that's created by the drug addiction.
This is Dr Carol Myers, today's episode of Health Connections included part one of the 2026 annual legislative update with Senator Richard Briggs. Part two will be aired on January 20 on WUOT.
