By Julie
Steenhuysen and Jilian Mincer
Reuters
Originally published December 26, 2011
On a recent
shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly
homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had
been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked
if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of
Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College
of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said
the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost
as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the
country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies -
attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health
services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression
takes its toll.
This trend is
taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait
until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are
people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us
they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide
for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia
Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General
Hospital in Boston.
Visits to the
hospital's psychiatric emergency department have climbed 20 percent in the past
three years.
The entire story
is here.
