Residents across the Thumb region have an opportunity to make their voice heard on one of the most important and often underaddressed topics in community health — and the window to participate is closing soon.
The Thumb Community Health Partnership, known as TCHP, is conducting a behavioral mental health survey covering Huron, Lapeer, Sanilac, and Tuscola counties. The survey is open through March 31st, which means there are only a handful of days left for people who want to participate to do so.
The survey is not limited to any single group. It is designed for a broad audience — general community members, local leaders, and professionals who work in organizations connected to behavioral health, including primary care providers and mental health practitioners. That breadth is intentional. Understanding the mental health landscape of a region requires input from multiple perspectives: the person struggling with anxiety who lives in a rural township far from the nearest counselor, the family doctor who sees mental health concerns show up in every third appointment, the nonprofit director who watches her organization’s waiting list grow longer every month, and the county commissioner trying to allocate limited resources across competing community needs.
Each of those voices contributes something different and something necessary to a complete picture of what behavioral health looks like in the Thumb right now — what resources exist, where the gaps are, what barriers prevent people from accessing care, and what the community’s priorities should be as programs and funding decisions are made in the months ahead.
Why This Survey Matters
Behavioral health surveys of this kind are not academic exercises. They are planning tools. The data gathered through a community health needs assessment directly informs how regional health organizations, county governments, and state agencies allocate resources, design programs, and prioritize investments. When residents participate in surveys like this one, they are contributing to decisions that will affect whether mental health services in their community expand or contract, whether funding goes toward crisis intervention or prevention, and whether the programs that exist actually reflect what people in the community need.
The Thumb region — like most of rural Michigan — faces mental health challenges that are shaped by specific geographic and demographic realities. Access to care is genuinely constrained by distance. The nearest mental health provider may be a significant drive from a rural township, and transportation barriers make that distance even more prohibitive for people without reliable vehicles or the flexibility to take time away from work for appointments. Stigma around seeking mental health care remains more pronounced in some rural communities than in urban areas, making it harder for people to ask for help even when services are available.
Workforce shortages in behavioral health are real and persistent. Finding and retaining qualified mental health professionals in rural areas is a challenge that affects wait times, continuity of care, and the overall capacity of local systems to respond when demand increases. The opioid crisis has added pressure to behavioral health infrastructure across the region — a reality reflected even in recent local government decisions, such as Harbor Beach City Council’s use of Huron County’s Opioid Settlement Fund to purchase AEDs for public facilities, as communities work to deploy settlement dollars toward health and safety priorities.
None of those challenges can be addressed effectively without a clear and current understanding of what the community is experiencing. That is what the TCHP survey is designed to provide.
Who Should Participate
If you live or work in Huron, Lapeer, Sanilac, or Tuscola County, this survey is relevant to you. The questions are designed to be accessible to general community members — you do not need a clinical background or professional expertise to participate meaningfully. Your experience as a resident, a family member, a neighbor, or a community volunteer is exactly the kind of firsthand knowledge that a behavioral health needs assessment is built to capture.
For healthcare providers and mental health professionals working in the region, participation is particularly valuable. The clinical perspective — the patterns you observe in patients and clients, the referral gaps you encounter, the system-level barriers that affect your ability to provide care — represents a kind of knowledge that community surveys often struggle to capture adequately. Taking the time to complete the survey adds a layer of professional insight that strengthens the overall dataset and produces more actionable results.
For community leaders — elected officials, nonprofit directors, school administrators, faith community leaders — the survey offers an opportunity to formally document what you are seeing in the populations you serve. The decision-makers who will eventually act on this survey’s findings are more likely to invest in solutions that show up repeatedly across different types of respondents.
How to Take Part Before the Deadline
Participating in the survey is straightforward. Residents can access it directly through the TCHP website at www.thumbhealth.org or through the direct survey link at www.surveymonkey.com/r/BHThumb26. Both links lead to the same survey, and participation is anonymous.
The March 31st deadline is firm. After that date, the survey closes and data collection ends. Anyone who has been meaning to complete it but has not yet done so should prioritize setting aside the time before the month ends.
For those who want more information about the survey, its purpose, and how the results will be used to support behavioral health initiatives across the Thumb region, TCHP Director Kelli Braun can be reached directly by email at braun@thumbhealth.org. Braun and her team can provide context on how the survey fits into the broader community health planning process and what outcomes participants can expect to see from the data collected.
The Thumb region’s behavioral health infrastructure has received attention at multiple levels of local governance in recent months. Earlier this year, the Huron County Board of Commissioners approved the annual submission for Huron Behavioral Health, with commissioners noting a positive trend of decreasing suicide rates attributed to sustained county funding — concrete evidence that investment in behavioral health services produces measurable results when it is maintained consistently over time. The TCHP survey is the next step in ensuring that investment continues to be guided by current, accurate data rather than assumptions about what the community needs.
For Thumb-area residents who want to learn more about the Thumb Community Health Partnership and its broader work supporting regional health initiatives, the organization’s website at www.thumbhealth.org provides information on its programs, partnerships, and community health planning efforts. And for those seeking mental health resources in the region while the survey and planning process unfolds, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services behavioral health resources page offers information on available services, crisis support, and provider directories for residents across the state.
