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Thursday, November 4, 2021

The AMA needs to declare a national mental health emergency

Susan Hata and Thalia Krakower
STAT News
Originally published 6 OCT 21

As the pandemic continues to disrupt life across the U.S., a staggering number of Americans are reaching out to their primary care doctors for help with sometimes overwhelming mental health struggles. Yet primary care doctors like us have nowhere to turn when it comes to finding mental health providers for them, and our patients often suffer without the specialty care they need.

It’s time for the American Medical Association to take decisive action and declare a national mental health emergency.

More than 40% of Americans report symptoms of anxiety or depression, and emergency rooms are flooded with patients in psychiatric crises. Untreated, these issues can have devastating consequences. In 2020, an estimated 44,800 Americans lost their lives to suicide; among children ages 10 to 14, suicide is the second leading cause of death.

Finding mental health providers for patients is an uphill climb, in part because there is no centralized process for it. Timely mental health services are astonishingly difficult to obtain even in Massachusetts, where we live and work, which has the most psychologists per capita. Waitlists for therapists can be longer than six months for adults, and even longer for children.

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By declaring a mental health emergency, the AMA could galvanize health administrators and drive the innovation needed to improve the existing mental health system. When Covid-19 was named a pandemic, the U.S. health care infrastructure adapted quickly to manage the deluge of infections. Leaders nimbly and creatively mobilized resources. They redeployed staff, built field hospitals and overflow ICUs, and deferred surgeries and routine care to preserve resources and minimize hospital-based transmission of Covid-19. With proper framing and a sense of urgency, similar things can happen for the mental health care system.

To be clear, all of this is the AMA’s lane: In addition to the devastating toll of suicides and overdoses, untreated mental illness worsens cardiac outcomes, increases mortality from Covid-19, and shortens life spans. Adult mental illness also directly affects the health of children, leading to poor health outcomes across generations.