The state of mental health care in the US

As regular readers might have noticed, I'm not too impressed with health care in the US (being it mental or physical). Americans get very little for their astronomical costs. This was demonstrated when a woman died in the psychiatric emergency room at Kings County Hospital Center, without anyone noticing before it was too late.

Turns out that the reason they didn't notice, was because there was nothing unusual going on.

Some psych patients wait days in hospital ERs

When staffers at a Brooklyn hospital spotted a middle-aged woman lying face-down on a waiting room floor last month, it hardly seemed like cause for alarm.

The sight, after all, was common in the psychiatric emergency room at Kings County Hospital Center. The unit is so routinely backed up with people waiting hours, or even days, for services that patients often spend the night nodding in chairs or sprawled in a corner.

It took an hour before a nurse realized the prone woman was in trouble. By then, she was dead.

Because of lack of facilities, patients are often put into the emergency room to wait until some facilities can be found for them.

A survey of hundreds of U.S. hospitals released last month by the American College of Emergency Physicians found that 79 percent reported that they routinely "boarded" psychiatric patients in their waiting rooms for at least some period of time because of the unavailability of immediate services.

One-third reported that those stays averaged at least eight hours, and 6 percent said they had average waits of more than 24 hours for the next step in a patient's care.

This points to a very serious problem. Waiting for 24 hours in an emergency room, is not a good way of treating people who needs psychological help.

After the incident, steps are being taken to get more facilities. But that's local measures, not national, so I guess it's only a question of time before it happens again in a different location.

Mentally ill children given up for foster care

Via Readerville, I became aware of this.

Mental Illness Sends Many to Foster Care

Almost one of every four children in Virginia's foster care system is there because parents want the child to have mental health treatment, a report commissioned by the General Assembly states.

The study -- the result of a months-long examination of the state's foster care and mental health services -- chronicles the difficult decisions that thousands of Virginia parents have made to relinquish custody of their children to the foster care system so they can get mental health services that are otherwise unavailable or unaffordable.

We are speaking of up towards 25% of all foster children in Virginia, or, going by the numbers in the article, 23%. 23%. That's 2008 children. If mental health care had been freely available for free (or at an income based cost), there would be 23% less foster children in Virginia.

And it's not isolated to Virginia.

Last year, the federal government found that at least 12,700 children were placed in foster care or juvenile jails only because they needed mental health treatment. The study called it a significant problem in every state.

Given the numbers from Virginia, I think it's safe to adjust that number quite a bit upwards.

This is an example of the human costs of the lack of an affordable health care system (such as universal health care), which ends up costing society a lot more in the long run.