The powers and duties of the Michigan Department of Mental Health (MDMH) are enumerated in the state's Mental Health Code.  They include the following: "(1) function in the areas of mental illness, developmental disabilities, organic brain and other neurological impairment or disease, alcoholism, substance abuse, the prevention of mental disability, and the promotion of good mental health; (2) provide on a residential or nonresidential basis, any type of patient or client service including but not limited to prevention, diagnosis, treatment, care, education, training, and rehabilitation; (3) engage in research programs and professional training programs; (4) operate directly or through contractual arrangement the facilities that are necessary or appropriate; and (5) promote and maintain an adequate and appropriate system of county community mental health services throughout the state in which the Department shifts the primary responsibility for the direct delivery of public mental health services from the state to a county."[118]

As a great deal of recent scholarship has found, state run mental health programs are often harmful to the very patients they were intended to help; many have proven themselves to be excessively controlling, and even dehumanizing.  Moreover, many of Michigan's mental health programs, like programs located throughout the budget, have swelled in size due to excessive bureaucracy and mismanagement.  Curing these two problems--eliminating unnecessary and counterproductive programs as well as reducing overhead and management costs--is what the state should do in the next fiscal year; and it could to do so by implementing the changes listed below.