Mental healthcare in America is a maze — by design. Imagine a sprawling house in which every room, doorway, and hall passage was designed by a different architect. Doorways don't connect. Staircases lead to nowhere. Rooms are cut off from each other. That's how reporter Will James describes our complicated system for treating people with severe mental illness – a system that, almost by design, loses patients with psychosis to an endless loop between the streets, jail, clinics, courts and a shrinking number of hospital beds. Lost Patients is a deeply-reported, six-part docuseries examining the difficulties of treating serious mental illness through the lens of one city's past, present and future. With real-life testimonials from patients, families, and professionals on the front lines, Lost Patients provides a real, solutions-oriented look at how we got stuck here...and what we might do to break free. Lost Patients is a joint production of KUOW and Seattle Times. It is distributed by the NPR Network. https://lnkd.in/g_wz3g3n
Accessing mental health care can be a harrowing ordeal. Even if a patient finds a therapist in their network, their insurance company can overrule that therapist and decide the prescribed treatment isn’t medically necessary. This kind of interference is driving mental health professionals to flee networks, which makes treatment hard to find and puts patients in harm’s way. ProPublica sought to understand what legal protections patients have against insurers impeding their mental health care. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/08/23/nx-s1-5084256/insurance-mental-health-care-coverage-legal-protection
Acadia Healthcare is one of America’s largest chains of psychiatric hospitals. Since the pandemic exacerbated a national mental health crisis, the company’s revenue has soared. Its stock price has more than doubled. But a New York Times investigation found that some of that success was built on a disturbing practice: Acadia has lured patients into its facilities and held them against their will, even when detaining them was not medically necessary. In at least 12 of the 19 states where Acadia operates psychiatric hospitals, dozens of patients, employees and police officers have alerted the authorities that the company was detaining people in ways that violated the law, according to records reviewed by The Times. In some cases, judges have intervened to force Acadia to release patients. Some patients arrived at emergency rooms seeking routine mental health care, only to find themselves sent to Acadia facilities and locked in. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/business/acadia-psychiatric-patients-trapped.html
“I Don’t Want to Die”: Needing Mental Health Care, He Got Trapped in His Insurer’s Ghost Network https://www.propublica.org/article/ambetter-ghost-network-consequences
Administrative Coordinator at Harborview Medical Center
3moAlthough federal law requires insurers to provide the same access to mental and physical health care, these companies have been caught, time and again, shortchanging customers with mental illness — restricting coverage and delaying or denying treatment. These patients — whose disorders can be chronic and costly — are bad for business, industry insiders told ProPublica. “The way to look at mental health care from an insurance perspective is: I don’t want to attract those people. I am never going to make money on them,” said Ron Howrigon, a consultant who used to manage contracts with providers for major insurers. “One way to get rid of those people or not get them is to not have a great network.” There are nowhere near enough available therapists in insurance networks to serve all of the people seeking care. And although almost all Americans are insured, about half of people with mental illness are unable to access treatment. The consequences can be devastating. To understand the forces that drive even the most well-intentioned therapists from insurance networks, ProPublica plunged into a problem most of https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/08/24/nx-s1-5028551/insurance-therapy-therapist-mental-health-coverage