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.
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.
“It seems like everyone has been holding their breath for a year, and now, it’s just a total explosion of everything, both in terms of high volume but also the severity of cases,” Dr. Sparks said. “You see a lot more people who were, pre-pandemic, kind of overwhelmed and stressed, and now they have full-on anxiety disorders or depression.”
The wave of mental-health cases has “grown into a tsunami”, flooding an already overtaxed healthcare system. Emergency departments say they are being overwhelmed by patients who either deferred care, or simply couldn’t access it, during the pandemic, or whose symptoms were exacerbated or aggravated by the lockdowns.
Some doctors fear this is only the beginning, and that the full impact of the pandemic on mental health won’t be ascertainable for years. Here’s a breakdown of some of the other key information from the WSJ story:
Children have been hit
particularly hard. School closures have led to serious mental health issues
going unnoticed because teachers and school psychologists are a primary source
of referrals. Even before the pandemic, the country faced a shortage of
mental-health professionals serving juveniles: the American Academy of
Pediatrics last year estimated the need for child psychiatrists at 47/100K people,
roughly 4x the number in practice. Emergency-room visits for mental-health
crises among 12- to 17-year-olds increased 31% between 2019 and 2020 according
to the CDC. At the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center,
pediatric-outpatient volume surged 30% in the first four months of 2021
compared with the year earlier. “We have more kids waiting for care than we
ever have before,” said Abigail Schlesinger, the hospital’s chief of child and
adolescent psychiatry. “We’re in the mental-health emergency phase of this
pandemic.”
Suicides have risen among minors.
Emergency-room visits for suspected suicide among kids 12-17 rose 22% last
summer compared with the previous year, and 39% this past winter compared with
the previous winter.
More mental-health crises are ending
up in emergency rooms in part because outpatient facilities, including private
psychiatrists’ offices, therapy practices, and crisis centers are simply
overwhelmed. “For us, it’s definitely a lot of people who either had
pre-existing conditions or have neglected to address their new onset of
emotional imbalance,” said Damir Huremovic, a psychiatrist at North Shore
University Hospital on Long Island. “Many developed anxiety or insomnia, and
they tried to see a provider but no one was taking new patients, and then
things sort of just snowballed.”
Crisis hotlines are bumping.
Overall volume at Resolve, a crisis hotline serving an impoverished slice of
Pittsburgh, saw rates of calls between January and April surge 27% compared
with the year-earlier period. For the past six months, Resolve has been
handling hundreds of phone calls a day, with as many as 50 of them serious
enough to require a home visit by trained clinicians. That’s 2x to 3x the level
from two years ago. “Isolation is the overarching theme,” said Jeff McFadden, a
phone crisis clinician at the center who says the volume of calls is the
highest he has seen in his 13 years at Resolve. “It’s everything from ‘I’m
lonely’ or ‘my girlfriend broke up with me,’ to ‘I’ve got a gun right next to
me, give me a reason to live’…There’s this perfect storm where people feel
trapped in their own houses and alone. We’re seeing it more and more.”
Delays in finding care are also a
problem. “Clinics that used to be able to get people in within a couple of
days, it now takes a couple of weeks or months,” one doctor said. The past year
has “broken all the paradigms” for how to treat mental-health cases in the
community.
Increasingly, the doctors and nurses who care for patients seeking urgent care for psychiatric issues are feeling job-related stressors like burnout intensify. “You can only take so much when you’re sleep-deprived, exhausted, and juggling other people’s problems like balls on fire for so many nights in a row,” one doctor said.
And another epidemic of
health-care workers taking leave or quitting due to burnout is the last time
the health-care system needs.
Source: yournews
No comments:
Post a Comment