“Unfortunately for mental health, at this moment, there isn’t an alternative,” Mr. Coleman said.

State lawmakers are considering proposals that would reduce community-based health care services for adults and children and for community mental hospitals by about $152 million in 2012 and 2013. It is roughly a 20 percent reduction in financing from the previous two-year budget. For community mental hospitals, financing would fall about 3 percent, but the money would be split among five facilities instead of three.

By 2006, Texas already ranked 50th among the states in per capita spending on mental health care, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The strained budget allows the Harris County mental health agency to serve only about 25 percent of the adults in need and about 18 percent of the children, said Betsy Schwartz, president and chief executive of Mental Health America of Greater Houston.

Currently, about 2,000 people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and serious clinical depression are on the agency’s waiting list. “We’re already talking about a system that was hemorrhaging,” Ms. Schwartz said, adding that in Houston alone, the proposed cuts would mean up to 2,000 of the 8,500 adults who now receive community-based services would be turned away.

Cutting those services would take a devastating human toll, Ms. Schwartz said, and at an enormous financial cost. When people with untreated mental health problems fall into crisis, it is much more expensive to provide care in an emergency room, jail or crisis center.

The Harris County Neuropsychiatric Center saw a 45 percent increase in crisis patients entering the center from 2008 to 2010, she said. Every time a patient walks into the center in crisis, it costs $800 to perform an initial exam, Ms. Schwartz said. By comparison, it costs about $12 a day for community-based mental health care services.

“It’s not like people are going to disappear and the needs are going to go away,” she said. “It may shift the burden from state dollars to county dollars.”