US Suffers Explosion In Urgent Mental-Health Cases As COVID Recedes

 

 

The latest indication that the COVID-19 pandemic (and the heavy-handed lockdowns imposed in the US and elsewhere) is leading to a relatively quiet, but still severe, mental health crisis appeared in Monday’s Wall Street Journal via a report about the surge in urgent mental-health-related cases clogging up emergency rooms and psychiatric hospitals around the country. 

And as the US increasingly moves to reopen, the whiff of newfound freedom is apparently pushing more people over the edge. 

WSJ begins its story at Pittsburgh’s largest psychiatric hospital, where one doctor working the overnight shift has seen the average number of daily cases double to nearly two dozen from nearly a dozen.

Americans Seek Urgent Mental-Health Support as Covid-19 Crisis Ebbs

 

Hospital ERs across the country say they are overwhelmed by patients who didn’t receive psychiatric treatment through the pandemic

 

Resolve Crisis Services provides phone and mobile mental-health support to 1.2 million people in Pittsburgh and surrounding areas, handling hundreds of calls a day.

PITTSBURGH—Before the coronavirus pandemic took hold, psychiatrist Garrett Sparks usually treated about a dozen patients on his overnight shift in the emergency department at Western Psychiatric Hospital, the city’s biggest mental-health hospital. On a recent Thursday evening, he saw 21 cases.