Hospital ERs Struggle To Treat Surge Of Mental Health Patients
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- Опубликовано: 21 сен 2022
- They couldn't find me anywhere to go.” More mental health patients are going to hospital emergency rooms. A Newsy investigation finds they’re not always getting the help they need.
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The disappearance of long-term-care facilities and psychiatric beds has escalated over the past decade, sparked by a trend toward deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients in the 1950s and '60s, says Dominic Sisti, director of the Scattergood Program for Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care at the University of Pennsylvania.
"State hospitals began to realize that individuals who were there probably could do well in the community," he tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson. "It was well-intended, but what I believe happened over the past 50 years is that there's been such an evaporation of psychiatric therapeutic spaces that now we lack a sufficient number of psychiatric beds."
A concerted effort to grow community-based care options that were less restrictive grew out of the civil rights movement and a series of scandals due to the lack of oversight in psychiatric care, Sisti says. While those efforts have been successful for many, a significant group of people who require structured inpatient care can't get it, often because of funding issues.
A 2012 report by the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit organization that works to remove treatment barriers for people with mental illness, found the number of psychiatric beds decreased by 14 percent from 2005 to 2010. That year, there were 50,509 state psychiatric beds, meaning there were only 14 beds available per 100,000 people.
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"Many times individuals who really do require intensive psychiatric care find themselves homeless or more and more in prison," Sisti says. "Much of our mental health care now for individuals with serious mental illness has been shifted to correctional facilities."
The percentage of people with serious mental illness in prisons rose from .7 percent in 1880 to 21 percent in 2005, according to the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights.
Many of the private mental health hospitals still in operation do not accept insurance and can cost upwards of $30,000 per month, Sisti says. For many low-income patients, Medicaid is the only path to mental health care, but a provision in the law prevents the federal government from paying for long-term care in an institution.
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Where I'm at, the ER does very little beyond babysitting psych patients. We are dependent on an outside company to assess patients for mental health treatment which can be as quick as a few hours to as long as 24 hours than if they're mandated to go inpatient they can sit in the ER for days, sometimes weeks. The longest I've seen someone in the ER waiting for a bed is 3 weeks. The whole system is a joke, like the rest of our healthcare system, led by the people that blame mental health for everything but at the same time refuse to fund it.
Those rNA shots kicking in hard now. Geez, I've seen it up close and it is not pretty.
Q grants you two Patriot points. Keep up the good work. Lizard Team 3 has their eyes on you.
Our country is terrible compared to the UK for mental health options. They actually help people and Drs can prescribe you to literally go on vacation at a real spa and it's all covered by the nhs. I'm ashamed of our health insurance system.