EDITORIAL: Mental health: Growing needs met with short supply
Free PressAug 22, 2021
Aug. 22—An in-depth report in last Sunday's
The system had flaws to begin with. The pandemic has wrought significant challenge to healthy minds. There has been a vast increase of mental health needs — from young people who've been isolated from school and normal social development, to middle age people and seniors.
Isolation, depression and anxiety increased as our social order turned upside down with the pandemic. Kids couldn't go to school, seniors had to isolate and everyone had to change the way they worked and the way they played.
Local practitioners find themselves busier than ever, while at the same time dealing with their own pandemic-related mental health stressors.
There's a shortage of practitioners. And clinics and hospitals have dropped mental health services due to low reimbursement rates that the insurance companies don't want to raise. Government has been slow with solutions also.
There are 23,431 mental health care providers in
People who live in rural areas of
In a sign of progress, it appears the stigma of dealing with a mental health issues is slowly easing, mostly led by young people, many of whom may have been on "meds" since their teenage years. In another sign of progress, state officials quickly equalized reimbursement rates for telemedicine when the pandemic hit.
But there's plenty of hill left to climb.
We aim to inform community and state policy leaders on problems with the mental health system and advocate for solutions, but the first step is getting everyone with a stake in mental health — all of us — to realize the scope of the problem.
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