Sentinel Colorado

State regulators have overlooked what former Mind Springs workers describe as a long pattern of fraud 

The audit found that Mind Springs' prescription practices were placing patients' well being at risk, in part, because some were being prescribed multiple controlled substances, such as stimulants and sedatives "at high doses."

When Crisis Access of Colorado won a bid to reform the state’s mental health services, its leader planned to bring the “A-Team” to serve the state’s poor and mentally ill. But mental health lobbyists used political connections to pressure state leaders out of their contract.

"This newly proposed Behavioral Health system change does not make allowance for this type of on-going community support response," Aurora Mental Health Center CEO Kelly Phillips Henry said.

A pattern of “severe, life-threatening” prescription errors by the troubled mental health center responsible for treating 10 Western Slope counties put many of its patients at risk, according to the findings of an official investigation that three state agencies withheld from the public for more than nine months.

At its core, Aurora Sustained is aimed at getting people mental health care who are in need and likely haven’t sought it out. So far, the program, which has been running since June, has found that about 90% of the inmates agreed to participate in services provided by Aurora Mental Health. 

Two counties are breaking from their mental health provider. Others are taking notes.

“There is a different level of satisfaction in the work when you don’t solve somebody’s problem,” he said. “You see them over and over and over again and you don’t have that sensation of cure or remedy. People’s distress is hard to solve.” 

State mental health safety net is ‘failing’ residents in Aurora and across the state. Will planned reforms fix or further the problems?

"It's like we were living in this tragedy with them," said Kevin Berthia, a mental health advocate who has survived his own suicide attempts. "Now how is that not creating trauma for anybody else? Who else is this triggering?"

Elijah Thomas and Josh Wyatt lost their fathers just 27 days apart last December, turning their worlds upside down even as they dealt with the coronavirus pandemic and all that went with it. Fortunately, they had each other, the game of basketball and coach Shawn Palmer and their teammates on the Rangeview boys basketball team, all of which have lifted them up and helped them contribute to the Raiders' undefeated season.

Navee Essien, 17, of Aurora, tried to end her life in November. She since has been diagnosed with bipolar, anxiety and major depressive disorders, and is learning to manage them.

“Sometimes, it just helps for one of us to look at the other and say, ‘You’re not going to die,’” Humphrey adds.

Tylan Jones is not naive. He is a 20-year-old Black man living in the United States. This reality does not easily accommodate naivete. When he was in middle school, he says, he and some Black...

“It would have given me my life back if I could have avoided it,” he says.

“It’s like, dude, every woman I know has been assaulted or raped or whatever, and if you bring that up to a woman, what’s your purpose besides poking the bear and being a dick? I was done with him. Finished.”

“Toby committed suicide,” Carleton says, and for a while he can’t say anything else. “He was a friend of my kids. He was 16 and no one saw it coming.”

Colorado’s shadow epidemic: Heightened anxiety, depression are testing families, communities and Colorado’s already-frayed safety nets

“I swear to God I know I look like that crazy woman who is screaming about this terrible dream and everybody’s like ‘What is wrong with her?’ I feel like I’m in a psych ward yelling, but nobody can hear me.”

“This whole thing about people thinking they need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, this reluctance to come forward (and) ask for help, it’s asinine because it’s, like, 2020 and people are hurting and it’s important to know that doing it on your own is bullshit,” he says. “This stigma needs to stop.”

“We knew something was going to happen, but not this. This has been just brutal” said Colvin, who is a licensed cosmetologist. Lopez is an esthetician.

“How do you tell someone that the ways the government failed them have been colossal and, well, we’re sort of the laughing stock of the western world?”

It has taken months for Torres to begin to feel herself again and she says she does feel better, mentally and physically, though she would not call it back to normal. Fear accompanies her now. She says her kids think she is paranoid. She has “panic attacks from hell.”

“[My therapist] has always told me to think about it as being on an airplane,” she says. “They tell you to put on your oxygen mask first.”

“That was really like an, 'Alright, I want to continue living. I want to keep doing this,' turning point and healing moment,” Evermoore said.