At 20 years old, he was no longer the popular high school wrestler and football player in suburban Omaha. He was lost inside paranoia and violence. A doctor gave him a name for it: schizoaffective disorder.

When he was arrested in March 2019, Jacque Palczynski begged to get her son out of the Douglas County Jail. An employee gave her a form.

“She gave me hope that he would be able to go to a hospital,” Palczynski said. “I filled out the paperwork and heard nothing.”

Last year, doctors, police and family members like Palczynski sent 1,072 requests to Douglas County to initiate, delay or re-evaluate a commitment. Their purpose: Forcibly hospitalize or medicate people thought to be dangerously mentally ill when they refuse treatment.

Only 51 people were committed, according to county data. That’s a shockingly small number, one expert told the Flatwater Free Press. And the overall trend over the past decade — requests soaring, commitments dropping — suggests it’s a symptom of a wider problem.

“The current system is just broke,” said Tim Heller, who has filed at least six requests on his son and now chairs a state behavioral health advisory committee. “And nobody wants to take responsibility to fix it.”

Those committal trends actually represent good news to Michael McClellan, a 20-year member and current chair of the Douglas County Board of Mental Health, which has the final say on commitments.

The more resources in the county, he said, the less need to force treatment.

“That’s clearly gotten better in the last 10 years,” he said. “There’s no doubt about that.”

There’s also evidence that needs are growing faster.

The number of seriously mentally ill inmates in the Douglas County Jail has increased, and visits to Omaha-area emergency rooms and calls to police for behavioral health issues have risen.

People shouldn’t have to be committed, Douglas County Public Defender Tom Riley says. But the county and the state aren’t offering alternatives.

“Until policymakers decide mental health is the elephant in the room in the criminal justice system and in these commitment-type hearings, then we’re going to keep doing the same thing,” Riley said.

The commitment data raises questions, said Mary Ann Borgeson. Despite being a Douglas County commissioner for 31 years, she’d never seen any data or reports about the process.

“It was one of those things that just kind of worked,” she said. “There really weren’t questions or concerns of ‘Maybe we should do this different.’ It’s probably well worth the conversation.”

‘Constrained To Some Extent’

When her son takes his medications, he’s fine, Palczynski said. When he doesn’t, he gets paranoid and violent.

“You saw the look in his eyes,” Palczynski said her son’s dad told her after their son attacked him once. “It was like … he was an animal.”

Once, he smashed someone’s car windows the same day he had an appointment with a psychiatrist. Palczynski drove him around Omaha for hours to keep him from being arrested.

Palczynski hoped the Douglas County Board of Mental Health could help shoulder the burden. But it hasn’t worked like that, she said.

Nebraska’s system prioritizes voluntary treatment. Decisions pass through law enforcement, health care workers and attorneys, but ultimately lie with the Board of Mental Health.

In Douglas County, at least three members of that board meet twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, often in an eighth-floor conference room a few floors above the Omaha mayor’s office.

The hearings cap a winding process that might start with police putting someone in emergency protective custody, generally a 36-hour stay in a hospital.

If the person doesn’t improve, a family member, doctor or law enforcement official can fill out a form and send it to the Douglas County Attorney’s Office, which then works with doctors to decide if the person’s case should be heard by the mental health board.

The board relies on recommendations and evidence from the attorney and health care workers, McClellan said. The board’s role is to follow the law, he said, not treat people.

It’s not clear who — or if anyone — has oversight.

The state doesn’t, according to Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Jeff Powell. Neither does the county board, Borgeson said. Judges have oversight over individual cases through appeals, but stay out of the board’s activity in order to remain impartial, said Douglas County District Court Judge Jeffrey Lux.

The fact that no one seems to be watching the commitment data is frustrating, Lux said. That data likely shows that people need more help than the board can provide.

“As a citizen, it’d be great if someone had a 30,000-foot view of this,” he said. “It’d be great to have more wraparound services that make sense, that seem more coordinated, that aren’t so reactive.”

That isn’t happening in the current “system of handoffs,” said Douglas County Sheriff Aaron Hanson.

Deputies often don’t know what happens after they pick up someone in crisis, Hanson said. Last year, Cass, Douglas, Dodge, Sarpy and Washington counties committed 97 people out of the 1,760 placed into this protective custody, according to state data.

Repeat requests are also increasing: Last year, one in five county filings concerned someone who’d had at least one interaction with the process that year.

“I don’t know if there’s any way to read this data other than as a super revolving door,” said Alex Barnard, a New York University assistant professor of sociology who studies commitments.

Sometimes, attorneys can do little if doctors won’t push for a commitment, said Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine.

The process failed to catch Gage Walters, Kleine said, who cycled through jail and commitment attempts before killing his grandmother and great-grandmother in August 2022.

Larry Derksen Jr. told the Flatwater Free Press that he warned authorities about his nephew, but was never able to get him committed. The nephew, Joseph Jones, was shot dead by police after bringing an assault rifle into a west Omaha Target in January 2023.

“It’s always, ‘OK, what do we do?’” Kleine said. “This family desperately needs help. They’re very concerned, and we want to help them. But we’re constrained to some extent.”

The decisions aren’t always clear for health care workers, either, said Dan Zak, a mental health practitioner who has worked on threat assessment with police and the Omaha VA Medical Center.

Standard evaluations are conducted to respond to people who want to hurt themselves. Doing that for someone who is violent toward others is harder, Zak said. If a person isn’t specific about where, when and how they plan to hurt someone, reporting them can cause fear among health care workers of violating patient privacy and inviting lawsuits.

“I think this is a great example of best intent with poor outcomes,” Zak said. “I think that our system, if it were run the way it was intended, would have more commitments.”

The system around the board could also be more robust, Zak said.

Two afternoon meetings a week doesn’t feel like enough time to meet the demand, he said. The board also has no employees of its own, though McClellan said new funding it will soon receive could help better track outpatient commitments.

There is also no test or interview to serve on the board, said Zak, who recently took the required training to become a member, which consisted of reading a manual, signing a document and visiting a notary. The state is developing new training techniques, said Powell, the DHHS spokesperson.

“I think that a government that was taking the civil liberties of its citizenry and the safety of its citizenry (seriously) would dedicate more resources to it,” Zak said.

The board doesn’t have the resources or legal authority to keep people in treatment, said Martha Wharton, an assistant public defender in Douglas County. That contributes to people cycling in and out of the system.

“They will not go out in the community and force medications on people,” she said.

Sarpy County has one case manager to keep people on track, a pilot program started with funding from Region 6 Behavioral Healthcare, which oversees public services in Cass, Dodge, Douglas, Sarpy and Washington counties.

Douglas County, which had eight times the commitments of Sarpy County last year, would need more case workers if a similar program were brought here, said Riley, the Douglas County public defender. That would require an investment in mental health that state leaders have so far not made.

A recent report commissioned by the Nebraska Legislature suggested the state restructure its public behavioral health services. It also emphasized criminal justice reform, suggesting increased use of solutions such as problem-solving courts, which state lawmakers voted down in 2022.

“I don’t think there’s a political will in Nebraska at this point to do something big,” said Sen. John Cavanaugh, a Democrat from Omaha who chairs the mental health reform committee.

A Place To Go

After multiple arrests, Palczynski eventually got her son committed and taken to a hospital. After weeks there, Palczynski wanted to know the hospital’s plan for his release.

She’d heard stories from friends about their mentally ill loved ones being released in the middle of the night with nowhere to go. That won’t happen to your son, a hospital employee said, according to Palczynski.

“That night at 2 o’clock in the morning, we get a knock on the door,” she said. “It was the cops bringing him home.”

But they didn’t drop him off empty-handed: “They gave me paperwork for the Board of Mental Health,” she said. “He had a court date.”

While the commitment process has flaws, those involved with it admit, there’s a bigger problem: The government can order treatment, they say, but where does it send them?

Some like Sheriff Hanson and Public Defender Riley see the problem as a lack of beds. 

The five Nebraska counties in the Omaha metro area have 127 beds to treat people in psychiatric crises — about 14 for every 100,000 people.

That’s below the national average, and far below the recommendation of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national group calling for 60 beds for every 100,000 people.

The state’s largest facility is in Lincoln, at the Lincoln Regional Center. Many of its beds are for “restoring competency” — getting people too mentally ill to stand trial properly medicated so they can face criminal charges.

When Palczynski’s son was ordered to the Lincoln Regional Center, the waitlist was so long that he instead stayed in solitary confinement in the Douglas County Jail for eight months, Jacque Palczynski said.

I’m in hell, he told his mom.

In 2022, the Legislature mandated that anyone ordered to competency restoration receive it in 60 days. The rule has brought wait times down, data shows.

The biggest problem isn’t the number of beds available, but what to do after being hospitalized, said Jason Haglund, a mental health policy consultant who worked on Cavanaugh’s mental health committee report.

In the report, Rural Policy Partners, the group that Haglund co-founded, identified a need for transitional housing to help bridge the gap.

Each day someone stays at the Douglas County Mental Health Center’s 16-bed facility, the less administrator Sherry Driver and her staff are reimbursed. Twenty-five years ago, when Driver worked at a similar facility, people stayed about 30 days on average. Today, at the county’s mental health center, it’s five days, she said.

Space can be scarce in transitional housing programs. Many people who visit the 16-bed facility are either homeless or at risk of homelessness, with mental health and substance abuse issues, Driver said.

Some states, including Iowa, use Medicaid to pay for transitional housing. It could help in Nebraska, but it would first require a statewide strategic plan around mental health, which the state doesn’t have, Haglund said.

Currently, Nebraska’s system makes it likely that a Nebraskan will get different care based on where in the state they live.

“There’s no one really in charge of the system,” Haglund said.

Solutions

Once Palczynski’s son got to the Lincoln Regional Center, he was happier, his mom said.

It wasn’t treatment, she said, but it was better than jail.

After more than a year, his criminal charges were dropped. He still wasn’t competent enough for court, but he also wasn’t dangerous enough to keep at the regional center.

When the state recommended he try another treatment facility, his mom didn’t expect much.

But years later, he’s taking medication and working occasionally. Jacque Palczynski attributes the turnaround to Community Alliance.

The Omaha-based behavioral health organization’s Assertive Community Treatment, or ACT, team surrounds people with a team of providers.

His case workers see him twice a week. One helps him work on things like signing up for Social Security. Another takes him to Runza every Thursday to hang out.

There are still ups and downs. But Palczynski can see a future for her son that wasn’t there before.

“Hopefully, it’s gonna be OK,” she said.

Community Alliance is one example of Omaha’s growing mental health resources.

Recently, Community Alliance opened a new headquarters near 72nd Street and Mercy Road. By January 2026, it will start operating as a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic, a federal designation that unlocks funding and treatment options.

The county is also building two new mental health facilities — one for the jail and one for the community. Children’s Nebraska is also building a mental health facility near 85th and Dodge streets.

The Omaha Police Department employs mental health workers who made 4,279 contacts last year —  a 70% increase in four years. The department also is taking fewer people into emergency protective custody and getting them to better treatment, said spokesperson Lt. Neal Bonacci. The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office added a similar employee in 2022.

Tim Heller, who has filed commitment requests for his son, and Haglund, the expert, said the area could make progress if it used assisted outpatient treatment, which adds more authority and oversight to case management and is used across the United States. In New York, it led to significant reductions in hospitalizations and arrests.

Kleine hopes for solutions that exist somewhere between commitments and dismissals. Treating serious mental health issues has changed markedly from the days of institutionalization, he said. But sometimes, he said, it seems there’s hesitation to get someone a higher level of care.

McClellan agrees, but said adding legal levers for treatment must be coupled with more resources.

“It might be the most draconian thing that can be done to a citizen of the United States is (to) pull them out of their house and say, ‘Oh, you need treatment,’” McClellan said. “On the other hand, I think the goal of everyone is to get people into sustained treatment, fully voluntary treatment.”

Palczynski wants that for her son, too.

But what happens if he stops taking his medication? Will someone catch him if things start to slip? Or will he fall through the cracks like he did before?

“You shouldn’t have to send somebody to jail in order to be safe,” she said, “in order for them to get help.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/just-broke-omaha-area-safety-net-failing-...

Douglas County Mental

Health Resources:

DCHD is excited to announce the launch of DouglasCounty.CredibleMind.com, a powerful new resource designed to support the mental health and wellness of Douglas County residents.

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