Sharing – Children in a mental health crisis can spend days languishing in the ER
This isn’t good, but it’s also not surprising:
A new study finds that nearly 1 in 10 kids on Medicaid visiting an emergency department for mental health care remain stuck there for days waiting for follow-up psychiatric care.
There has been a lot of news covering how we need to get people in treatment for addiction, depression, severe mental illness, etc. Most of it has been focused on getting people off the street, out of the classroom, or out of situations where they are a danger to themselves and others. It sounds nice. We certainly have issues with mental health in all of those situations.
What we don’t hear a lot about are the details, specifically, about what happens when the treatment resources don’t exist to meet the need. We may not think we are rounding up unhoused people and putting them in jails, but where do we think they will go when there aren’t enough treatment options? That’s going to include a lot of kids escaping abusive homes. Other kids end up hanging around the ER waiting for treatment if they aren’t in a penal facility already. Plenty of others remain in dangerous situations while they and their parents stay and search for somewhere to get treatment.
In short, we can’t talk about how we’re going to solve homelessness, addiction, youth mental health, etc., while also cutting the programs that already fall short of being enough to treat everyone who needs it.
The result will only be people piling up in jails, prisons, and other facilities that are harmful to mental health, not helpful.
