Sharing – Lost in the Storm
“My 10-year-old daughter thinks she should be dead. When I tried to help her, I saw how deep our national crisis really is.”
If you’re not familiar with what it can be like to try and get the proper mental health care in the US you should read this story. However, as you do read it, I need you to understand that this story, as hard as it is, actually represents the better side of the Mental Healthcare system. Ash’s parents have some financial means and expertise to help them navigate the system, even if her Mom had to leave her job. Now imagine what this looks like for someone without those things.
In truth, for the less fortunate it will never get as complicated as it got for Ash and her family, because they never even start into the whole system. It’s essentially closed off to them. (Try to find a therapist or program that accepts Medicaid and has openings for new patients.) The system isn’t capable of placing Ash in the right situation because they don’t really exist within the current educational and healthcare systems. (Count the number of times they are told “We aren’t capable to help her.”) No one has designed a proper treatment for a 10-year-old who wants to die. We’ve also not designed a system that offers resources to people in rural areas where there are few therapists, or to poor and working-class families. Nor have we made insurance companies hold up their requirements to adequately cover mental healthcare. Our system is lacking in many ways. We lose people to mental health issues every day not just because they don’t ask for help, but because they ask for help that doesn’t exist.
I hope Ash and her family can find something that works. I hope that for everyone else too. But I also recognize that getting that result is going to take a lot of hard work. As I’ve said before, 100,000 new therapists aren’t going to suddenly appear. New programs designed to help in different ways aren’t going to magically appear either. We need a commitment to finding new solutions that allow a broader spectrum of possibilities for helping those in need.
https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/child-teen-mental-health-crisis-therapy-help.html
