(12-9-19) Terresa Humphries-Wadsworth took her 14-year old son to an emergency room in Cody, Wyoming, because he was expressing thoughts of suicide. The staff sent him to the closest hospital with a psychiatric unit.

It was a hundred miles away in Montana.

Her son spent 10 days there before Humprhries-Wadsworth learned the hospital was out-of-network for her insurance. The closest in in-network facility was 200 miles away from their home.

The family ended up with $110,000 in out-of pocket expenses for two inpatient visits and residential treatment. They negotiated the amount down with the hospital and a collections agency, then took out loans to pay it off.

The Humphries-Wadsworth’s story was recently told by Kaiser Health News writer Jenny Gold in an article about parity. She explained how Congress passed a law mandating insurers provide equal access for mental and physical health care eleven years ago, but barriers to parity continue today.

I posted a blog last week about “patient boarding” in emergency rooms. Many of you wrote on my Facebook page about long waits that you had encountered in emergency rooms. Today, I am asking readers to share their stories on Facebook about how their insurance companies failed to treat mental health emergencies the same way financially that they do with physical problems. I will share them with the Kennedy Forum and Congress.

Click to continue…

Imamu Baraka came to the aide of a woman discharged on Jan. 9 from a Baltimore hospital wearing only a gown and socks. Baraka recorded video of the incident. (Facebook.com/imamu.baraka)

(12-3-19) Nothing illustrates “patient dumping” better than the viral video of 22-year-old Rebecca Hall being tossed out of the University of Maryland Medical Center into the freezing cold in January 2018 wearing little more than a hospital gown.

Delayed and Deteriorating: Serious Mental Illness and Psychiatric Boarding in Emergency Departments, a recent study released by the Treatment Advocacy Center, warns that Americans who visit emergency rooms with psychiatric problems have a higher rate of being dumped or being “boarded” than those without mental illnesses.

Psychiatric boarding is defined differently but most hospital administrators say having to wait six hours or more after being diagnosed in an emergency room awaiting treatment constitutes “boarding.” A 2016 survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians, found that more than 90% of emergency physicians say psychiatric patients board in their emergency room.

The average emergency room wait in Georgia for psychiatric patients requiring an inpatient bed is a whopping 34 hours, according to the TAC study authored by Elizabeth Sinclair Hancq, Jessica Walthall and John Snook.  Psychiatric patients who required admission to a hospital or transfer to a bed in a psychiatric facility in Massachusetts waited in emergency rooms from 16.5 to 21.5 hours compared to 3.9 hours to 4.2 hours for medical or surgical patients needing beds.

Click to continue…

Click to continue…

Photo by Dev Asangbam

(11-25-19) Anyone who advocates for persons with mental illnesses quickly begins receiving emails and telephone calls from desperate families seeking help. In Montana, those pleas end up being directed to Dr. Gary Mihelish, a recipient of the highest award given by the National Alliance on Mental Illness -its’ Distinguished Service Award.  I am posting this recent exchange between Dr. Mihelish and a Montana family NOT because it is extraordinary but because it is so common. 

11-14-19
Hi Gary,
I thought I’d give you a quick update about my brother who is in jail.

The Center for Mental Health said they are willing to work with him but all we got back from them is a big stack of paper work to fill out. Upon seeing the papers and remembering that they basically fired my brother as a client several years ago (I’m not saying it was unwarranted-but that he’s been with them before) we called Aware. (A mental health provider.) The woman there was very nice and helpful and she is going to try to get my brother to consent to work with them. It sounds as if they have great resources and at the very least if they could help with the payee work then my mom wouldn’t have to be the one giving him money.

We are crying tears of joy because someone offered us a ray of hope by saying they are willing to help and to not give up on my brother. You can’t believe how important and how good it feels just to have someone say they are willing to help and to tell us don’t give up.
As it stands now Aware is going to try to get my brother to agree to work with them. It’s the first sign that something may get done.

Click to continue…

 

(11-22-19) A close friend of long-time mental health advocate Betsy Greer urged those attending her memorial service yesterday to adopt Betsy’s “I’ll Do It” mantra.

I noted Betsy’s death and tireless efforts to improve the lives of those with mental illnesses, primarily through the National Alliance on Mental Illness, in an earlier blog. Acting NAMI CEO Angela Kimball and long-time NAMI advocate Bob Carolla spoke eloquently about their memories of Betsy. In addition to being honored by NAMI, a sign of her importance in her home state of Virginia was that Mira Signer, chief deputy commissioner of the state behavioral health department, was in attendance.

Betsy’s good friend, Rayna Aylward delivered a eulogy that should inspire all of us.

TRIBUTE TO BETSY GREER,

Rayna Aylward 11/21/19

     Betsy was an exceptionally smart and articulate person, and an accomplished writer and public speaker.   But the words I most remember from her are just three simple ones:     I’LL DO IT

    If there were something that needed to be done, or someone who needed to be helped, Betsy would say:  I’LL DO IT

    Betsy and I were longtime members of the Kol Ami congregation, but I didn’t really get to know her well until about two years ago, when I joined the Kol Ami Care & Concern Committee, which focuses on supporting members in times of need.  

Click to continue…

(11-18-19) In 1973,  Dr. David L. Rosenhan, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, announced that he and seven others had pretended to have a serious mental illnesses and were subsequently hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia even though they were faking.

His report, On Being Sane In Insane Places,  published in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, shocked the country and deeply weakened the public’s faith in psychiatrists, state mental hospitals, and psychiatry itself.

The article has been embraced for decades by the anti-psychiatry movement as proof mental illnesses are a “social construct” and do not exist. His study  “plunged the field into a crisis from which it has still not fully recovered,” the New York Times recently noted. “It made Rosenhan an academic celebrity. Nearly 50 years later, it remains one of the most cited papers in social science.”

Dr. Rosenhan, who died in 2012, claimed that three psychologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife, joined him in posing as patients. None of the other pseudo-patients was identified in his article, which he intended to publish as a book, nor were the doctors and hospitals that were bamboozled named.

It now appears his study might have been a hoax.

Click to continue…