If your child is saying they don’t want to live or don’t want to ever get out of bed again, you don’t want to wait five weeks." Lisa Lambert, mental health advocate "We’ve heard waits as long as five weeks or more for outpatient therapy. Then, after a couple of days there, “She goes to a facility, she stays there for seven to 10 days and comes home.” “Each time, it’s the same routine,” says Pam, starting with Melinda being rushed to an ER. This is Melinda’s fourth trip to a hospital emergency room since late November. ![]() She has therapists, but some of them changed during the pandemic, the visits were virtual and she hasn’t made good connections between crises. Pam says Melinda spiraled downward after a falling out with a close family member last summer. ![]() It’s very scary.”īut this experience is not new. “We occasionally hear screaming, yelling, monitors beeping,” says Pam. “It feels like I’m desperate for help.”ĭesperate is a word both Melinda and Pam use often to describe the prolonged wait for psychiatric care in a place that feels alien. Melinda is disturbed by cameras in her room and security guards in the hallways who are there, in part, for her safety. A survey of emergency rooms earlier this year found a quarter of all beds, on average, occupied by mental health patients of all ages waiting for a psych bed.Īt one point, Melinda tries to escape, is restrained, injected with drugs to calm her, and moved to a small, windowless room where everything brought in is screened and rejected if it can be used for self-harm. This is becoming more common across Massachusetts. Melinda’s first 10 days are spent in a hospital lecture hall with 11 or so other children, on gurneys, separated by curtains because the emergency room has run out of space. The state’s Health Policy Commission (HPC) says 39% of children who came to an ER with a mental health issue between March and September of 2020 ended up boarding. The state says the average time children wait for hospital-based psychiatric care is six days, but many parents report spending weeks with their children in hospital hallways or overflow rooms, in various states of distress, because psychiatric units are full. I meet Melinda, during a phone call, on her 12th day in the ER. “And it doesn’t show any signs of abating.” “We’ve been doing this a long time, and this is really unlike anything we’ve ever seen before,” says Lisa Lambert, executive director of the Parent/Professional Advocacy League. The Baker administration says the rate of increase has varied each month since last June, but each month the numbers are significantly higher compared to the same month of the prior year. What’s known as emergency room boarding has been up between 200% and 400% in Massachusetts throughout the pandemic. But if your brain is not well, and you end up in an ER, there’s a good chance the crisis will become getting stuck there. ![]() If you have a heart attack, you won’t wait long for a hospital bed. If you break an arm, it gets set and you leave. Right now in Massachusetts - and many parts of the U.S. and the world - demand for mental health care overwhelms supply, creating bottlenecks like the one Melinda is about to enter.Įmergency rooms are not typically places you check in for the night. We’ll only use first names for this teenager and her mother, Pam, to avoid having this story trail the family for years to come. Like a growing number of children during the pandemic, Melinda has not been stable for several months. ![]() EMTs arrive, help calm the 13-year-old down and take her to an emergency room. Her daughter, she says, is threatening to kill herself. One evening in late March, a mom north of Boston calls 911.
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