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Thursday, December 10, 2015

Decreasing mental health services increases mental health emergencies

Science Daily
Originally published November 20, 2015

Countywide reductions in psychiatric services -- both inpatient and outpatient -- led to more than triple the number of emergency psychiatric consults and 55 percent increases in lengths of stay for psychiatric patients in the emergency department. The before and after study of the impact of decreasing county mental health services was published online in Annals of Emergency Medicine ('Impact of Decreasing County Mental Health Services on the Emergency Medicine').

"As is often the case, the emergency department catches everyone who falls through the cracks in the health care system," said lead study author Arica Nesper, MD, MAS of the University of California Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento. "People with mental illness did not stop needing care simply because the resources dried up. Potentially serious complaints increased after reductions in mental health services, likely representing not only worse care of patients' psychiatric issues but also the medical issues of patients with psychiatric problems."

The entire article is here.