The Coronavirus lock-downs continue to spread widespread unemployment resulting in large income losses among our citizens.
But in addition to the forestalling of physical health and social issues being resolved, the largest crisis facing our country today has become a psychological one. For the past 8 months, daily doses of death, isolation, and fear have been emanating from all of our communication centers! The Washington Post informs us in its May 2020 article by William Wan, “Just as the initial outbreak of the novel corona virus caught hospitals unprepared, the United States’ mental-health system – vastly underfunded, fragmented and difficult to access before the pandemic – is even less prepared to handle this coming surge.”
A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found recently that nearly half of all U.S. citizens reported the CoVid19 virus was harming their mental health. In fact, a federal emergency hotline set up for people in emotional distress, registered a more than 1,000 percent increase in April when compared with the same time the previous year. Roughly 20,000 citizens texted that hotline, run by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
And with the possibility of people enduring these mental-health impacts for years to come, our economy might suffer into the future as stress and anxiety continue to debilitate some workers and further strain the medical system with overloaded emergency rooms filled with panic/anxiety attacks, overdoses, and depression.
In the United States, 1 in 5 adults already suffer the consequences of mental illness each year.
“Yet less than half receive treatment…,” Wan tells us. Suicide rates have increased 33 per cent in the past two decades! The real problem in America, however, is that behavioral health illnesses do not receive the same importance in treatment as do physical illnesses, such as heart trouble. While Congress has authorized $100 billion in emergency funds for hospitals and medical providers, our writer states “Very little will go to mental health and addiction service providers because they mainly receive funding through Medicaid. And most of the emergency provider money is being distributed through Medicare.”
A case example of this money distribution problem occurred recently to a friend of mine. While her son waited for a behavioral health hospital bed to open up in her hospital’s far reaching suburban area, he laid in an ER temporary holding area for 48 hours. Why did this highly uncomfortable delay occur?
a. An increase in mentally-ill patients with a decrease of psych employees and services had taken place recently from the pandemic’s shut-down tactics
b. Many behavioral health hospital beds were being used instead for CoVid19 patients
c. The need to follow 6 feet separation instructions had caused these suburban hospital wards to remove some beds and, therefore, some patients from their count.
