(Aug. 22, 2016) In some areas of Connecticut, patients wait an average of 100 days before an inpatient psychiatric bed becomes available, up from 30 to 40 days just five years ago, hospital executives say.
A shortage of psychiatric beds is straining Connecticut’s mental health system and leaving the state’s most severely mentally ill stuck in limbo (“Connecticut’s mental-health system is being strained by shortage of state psychiatric beds,” the Wall Street Journal, Aug. 18).
Waiting “makes everything worse,” said 28-year-old Tassiana Coppinger. “You are stuck in your own thoughts. You aren’t talking with anybody. You’re not socializing with anybody.”
Coppinger, who suffers from mental illness, went to the ER last April and waited four days before an inpatient psychiatric bed opened up. But many are not so lucky.
Five years ago, patients in the Hartford HealthCare’s Behavioral Health Network waited on average about 10 to 12 days for a state bed, said Jim O’Dea, vice president of operations for the network. Now, wait times have skyrocketed up to 30 to 60 days.
The wait times, for state beds and subsequently for private hospitals, “can really be destabilizing for somebody in a vulnerable place,” O’Dea said.
Dr. Charles Herrick, chairman of psychiatry for Danbury and New Milford Hospitals, and other hospital executives point out that when people with mental illness are stuck in a private hospital waiting for specialized care in the state psychiatric system, other patients often must wait to receive less specialized inpatient care from the private hospitals. That backlog strands some patients in emergency rooms as they wait to get an inpatient bed.
The backup of patients in emergency rooms is symptomatic of a mental health system disproportionate to the patient population it must serve.
With only 17.1 state beds per 100,000 population, Connecticut does not maintain enough state beds to provide minimally adequate treatment for residents with mental illness.
Connecticut residents suffering with severe mental illness need a safe, appropriate environment where they can receive comprehensive mental health treatment and stabilize. The best place for this is in an inpatient psychiatric hospital.
Imagine if people suffering from conditions such as heart attacks or cancer had to wait days or weeks in emergency departments before being admitted to the appropriate medical units. This scenario would undoubtedly ignite public outrage, and so should one in which people suffering from acute psychiatric illness are left stranded in an environment ill-equipped to provide them with the mental health treatment that they so desperately need.
Visit #aBedInstead to learn more about the Treatment Advocacy Center’s campaign to address our national psychiatric bed shortage.
To comment, visit our Facebook page.
Visit our blog archive to read all our recent posts.