There may be more than one way to provide additional mental health services to members of the Lawrence community.

Although there seems to be broad agreement that providing more services to people with serious mental illness is important to dealing with the city’s homeless population, there is less agreement on how to accomplish that goal. One of the issues, as often is the case, is a need for more communication between some of the key players.

Members of the city’s Task Force on Homeless Services reportedly plan to give top priority to having Lawrence Memorial Hospital reopen its inpatient mental health unit. LMH closed its unit several months ago, and reopening it probably seems to task force members like a simple way to provide people with serious mental illness the services they need.

Unfortunately, the task force apparently has reached this conclusion before fully understanding the situation, according to LMH CEO Gene Meyer, who told the Journal-World this week that LMH officials needed more opportunity to discuss the issues with task force members. LMH is working to develop new strategies for delivering mental health services, Meyer said, but reopening the mental health unit is not the only option.

There seems to be little question that the city needs increased services, as illustrated by the tragic case of a young Lawrence woman who was unable to receive needed treatment here and committed suicide before her mother could take her to an inpatient facility in another city. But there also are drawbacks to simply reopening the LMH unit. Financial considerations are among those, but even if the city is willing to subsidize those services, it may be difficult or impossible to maintain enough psychologists to staff the unit.

The point is, there surely is more than one way to attack this problem, and task force members need to sit down with hospital officials and fully understand their situation before making what might be an unrealistic recommendation. Good recommendations must be based on good information, and it seems that task force members may not have all the information they need.

Although increased mental health services would help make Lawrence a better community, it only makes sense that there might be more than one way to provide those services and that more than one agency might need to share that responsibility. This is a community issue that deserves broad community input, especially from those who are on the front lines of providing services to the homeless. Sitting down, talking and understanding the issues is an obvious first step.