Kristi Noem Asked Point Blank By Voter: How Will You Address Mental Health Crises?

yeah what are we going to do to improve mental health and Housing Services for people on low income disability because right now it's just horrible yeah it's horrible yeah I think in the state of Michigan uh we definitely don't have enough Services we don't have them across the state we have a significant issue even I mean as I traveled across the state I had so many Corrections Officers say to us we have people that shouldn't be in the jails we have people that need mental health help and we don't have it and that was there was an opportunity for for the governor to increase one of our facilities and that didn't get increased to the extent that it should have so we definitely need to look at how we can improve that across the state and also really there's there's so many things that need to be done in Michigan even in the jails we don't have enough Corrections Officers they even asked the governor if she could send in the National Guard and they were declined so we have a significant problem here in the state of Michigan and and this is where I think that the collaboration between Republican government is so great because I know that as Republican governors in other states have come across issues they they've gotten together on calls and even during covid got together in calls and said how do we come around our the people in our states and make it better so I I will I'll defer to you on what you've done no that's what happens when people have a mental health challenge in their lives a lot of times right now today they're ending up in an emergency room or in jail right because something has happened in their life and they've hit a crisis and they may end up with an addiction issue or something that puts them in one of those two and neither one of them is appropriate for that situation so we in our state in the last couple of years have built and funded five Crisis Care Centers regionally across our state that's a short term when somebody's in a crisis situation they come into that Crisis Care Center and we detox them we start the counseling process and we start the referrals to getting them a support system and counseling services that they need it's made all the difference in the world and we've engaged our churches because so many times people ask the government to do things that churches and people should be doing yeah they ask people to walk alongside people and they ask the government to raise our children they ask the government to educate our children they ask the government to to feed people and so much of that and and the responsibility for being a community is the community the churches the faith organizations that we were created to serve each other and that's a that's a point of it the one thing that I would say about um you know the situ ation that we have going on is that in South Dakota we have just developed and it'll be coming out in the next couple of weeks in our elementary schools a resiliency program we're going to teach our kids how to have resiliency from the time that they're elementary students and it is it's an amazing curriculum that we will give free of charge to all of our school districts if the counselors and the elementary teachers want to use it but it's called South Dakota sturdy and it's using our historical figures to teach them about how they took hard things in their life challenges and use them to be stronger and to have the resiliency and to make decisions better and to do it because a lot of times we're asking parents right now to be parents that never had good parents they don't know what it's like to be a good parent because they never had one and somebody's got to give them an example and and that's what this curriculum will do we should we should have we start with we start with Teddy Roosevelt who you all know the challenges Teddy Roosevelt went through goodness sakes the man was sick and then lost his wife and his mother on the same day and decided he was going to change his life but some of those skill sets we can build into our children too how about