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Wyoming Officials Will Consider Changes To Title 25

Senate Judiciary Chairman Leland Christensen
Wyoming Legislature

Wyoming officials will soon meet to consider how to reform the state’s system of involuntary treatment for mental health issues, known as Title 25.

That system allows police or mental health officials to detain someone they consider to be a danger to themselves or others, and make them undergo psychiatric treatment.

As Wyoming Public Radio has been reporting in its series on Title 25, the system is plagued by poor communication, ballooning costs, and substandard patient care, especially in rural areas of the state.

Teton County Senator Leland Christensen says, while Title 25 has come up in the legislature a number of times in recent years, it’s been in a single legislative committee looking at just one part of the system. This time Title 25 will be debated by a joint legislative-executive committee.

“The intent here is to bring all the involved players together,” Christensen told WPR. “Both from the legislature and the executive branch. It should be a pretty good sized group of people working together, and we should be able to get all different views included.”

Christensen says he doesn’t know exactly what they’ll focus on in the meetings, which will occur over the next few months. But one major issue is sure to be cost: the Title 25 system has burned through a 4 million dollar annual budget in just the last six months.

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