The state’s fragmented mental health care system fails to serve the growing number of depressed and suicidal children in Georgia. This applies regardless of whether or not you are covered by a plan to do so.
For a nation like ours, it is intolerable.
With children and their parents who are often desperate for the best care, we have to do better.
What do these failures look like in practice?
Children at risk spend hours, even days, in emergency rooms waiting for hospital beds to become available.
You might think the state’s largest children’s hospital would help here, but it doesn’t.
why?
Because they don’t provide inpatient mental health care. For that matter, neither do most general hospitals in our state.
As a result, children are often sent to private psychiatric hospitals designed primarily for adults, which may not have programs staffed by doctors and therapists who specialize in treating children.
These private institutions are often far from the orphanage, and parental visitation is typically severely restricted. As you can imagine, such isolation can exacerbate existing mental health problems.
You might think that these things aren’t a big deal, that kids are resilient and prone to needless whining and threatening, but statistics should quickly push that notion aside.
About 1 in 8 teenagers say they have had “serious” thoughts of suicide within the past year. Over the past decade, young Georgian suicides have doubled. At least 119 children and their teens will take their own lives in 2021, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health.
This is a terrible and unacceptable price. I implore all of us to demand that Georgia find a better way to help children in need.
what should i do?
For starters, Georgia needs to step up its mental health reform efforts recently launched at Golddome. Passed the Mental Health Equality Act.
It should be seen as just a start – a good start, yes, but just the beginning.
Former state legislator Kevin Tanner, chairman of the state’s Behavioral Health Reform and Innovation Commission, successfully summed up the challenge at a meeting in June.
“Now we are making this decade the decade of mental health reform.”
His sentiment should be widely supported among Georgians. And any substantive fix should start as soon as possible.
Last month, Gov. Brian Kemp named Tanner as the next leader of a state agency serving Georgians with mental illness, which is also an encouraging sign.
One of the major instruments that state legislators control is the amount paid to mental health care providers. There seems to be widespread agreement that it is too low.
With the economic rules of supply and demand intact, poor provider reimbursement could result in supply deserts like the one we see in Georgia.
Yes, it is always wise to spend taxpayer dollars judiciously. But spreadsheet statistics and all-too-common stories of family tragedies stemming from mental health crises strongly point to the need for more investment.
New mental health laws require state agencies to collect data, such as how Georgia payouts compare to other states. Tanner told his The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
But coordinating reimbursement alone is not enough to solve this crisis.
Georgia has too few hospital beds to treat young people with serious mental illness. Not at Children’s Health Care in Atlanta, nor at Children’s Hospital of Georgia, part of Georgia Medical College in Augusta.
In addition, there are sometimes serious persistent problems with the quality of care provided in existing facilities. This demonstrates a lack of regulatory oversight by the Georgia Department of Community Health.
As we made clear in our “Unprotected” series on aged care homes, the DCH often spends too much time investigating and imposing sanctions on care homes that fall short of acceptable standards. .
That should change as the mental health reform effort progresses here.
DCH should also be more transparent to Georgians about what it does or does not do. As an example, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s response to open record queries has long been dismal.
Georgians deserve greater insight into the institutions responsible for keeping vulnerable populations safe.
It is encouraging that many lawmakers recognize the serious problem.
But now is the time for Gold Dome, with Georgian support, to do more to solve the problem.
Editorial Board.
