From the terrible story of Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds and his son Gus, who apparently stabbed his dad and then took his own life with a gun yesterday:
On Monday, state mental health officials unsuccessfully sought to find a bed in a hospital psychiatric ward for Gus Deeds, who had undergone an evaluation, according to Mary Ann Bergeron, the executive director of the Virginia Association of Community Services Boards.
None could be found and he returned home, even though a magistrate had issued an order of involuntary commitment. “In that particular rural area of the state, it is not unusual to have contacted anywhere from seven to 15 hospitals” looking for an available bed, Ms. Bergeron said.
The lack of psychiatric beds is not solely a rural thing. I know someone who works at the large urban teaching hospital here, and this person tells me that the psych ward is almost always full, and there are long waiting lists for most mental health services. Psychiatric services are generally money losers for hospitals so there’s no incentive to have the kind of capacity they have for, say, hip replacments or cardiac catheterization. Yet, as we apparently saw at the Deeds house yesterday, untreated, serious mental illness is just as deadly as a heart attack.
To switch topics just a bit: consider all those low coverage policies that people are losing because the policies don’t meet Obamacare minimum requirements. I’m sure Richard knows the technical term for the mental health coverage those plans have. I just call it “shitty”. Mental health coverage under Obamacare-approved policies is a big step up from what most of the working poor are used to getting in their low-premium, low-coverage policies.
