Posted on 12/24/2011 9:37:50 AM PST by Dallas59
CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Goes without saying, this is going to get much worse.
But in the end we’ll all be saved by nobamacare.
Your Obama voter... I guess suicide qualifies for an EMTALA payment.
Confidential to Dr. William Sullivan: welcome to The New Frontier.
A lot if these people have healthcare coverage or currently would qualify for healthcare coverage under Medicaid because they have little or no income. Welcome to obamacare, ‘healthcare’ coverage w/o access to proper healthcare.
Duh. It must be getting cold in Chi-town.
There was an excellent book written in 1973, "Stations of the Lost" by Jacqueline Wiseman that described how the skid row alcoholic (now called "homeless") used the various social agencies as survival mechanisms. It would apply even more so today. They developed a lifestyle of following "the loop" from Skid row to city jail to county jail to county mental hospital to treatment center to shelter and back to the street. Most of them only spent about a third of their time on the street, usually depending on the seasonal weather.
These various agencies designed as means of social control are used as means of survival. If the person is a vet you can throw various VA bennies into the mix.
Want to stay in the most expensive hotel in town? Head to the ER and tell them you’re suicidal. Three squares, clean bed, nurses waiting on you...
Want to stay in the most expensive hotel in town? Head to the ER and tell them you’re suicidal. Three squares, clean bed, nurses waiting on you...
I thought it said “FR” for a second, well close enough.
Well, we *have* seen a rash of Paulbot postings lately...
Good point.
Just a bunch of folks preparing to vote for Paul.
Can’t be. There is a LAW in Mass where EVERYONE has health insurance.
I’ve been at the doctor gig since 1973, and I had my psychiatry training at public hospitals in Brooklyn.
All discussions about this subject ignore most of the facts:
1) There are a lot of crazy people, and their numbers are increasing
2) A lot of community organizing-type agitation makes crazy people worse
3) All the state hospitals, which housed millions of crazy people in 1955, are closed
4) There is not enough money on the planet to provide all the crazy people with outpatient treatment.
Start there if you want to discuss solutions.
Yeah, lots of funny jokes on this thread. I wonder how many of these homeless, suicidal "bums" were guys who a mere three years ago were holding down full-time jobs, making mortgage payments and supporting their families.
Oops, for a moment I thought the title said “Mentally Ill Flood FR...”
Illinois is in need of a tax increase!
Ditto, from a fellow shrink - doing my MD gig since 1984 and the shrink sub-gig since 1988, Boarded in ‘93.
Having spent sizable portions of my career working at both state hospitals and at public mental health clinics, I could go on and on confirming and elaborating upon your points, but instead, I’ll just offer up a few skewed insights that have fascinated me over the years:
1. The do-gooder involvement of federal and state governments have done nothing to lessen the suffering for most patients with serious mental illnesses, and have often enabled a worsening. The emptying of the state hospitals, and the stultifying politicization of what remains of them is but one example. Despite what should have been game-changing advances in pharmacological treatments for mental illness, and vast armies of people devoted to helping them live outside an institution, the experiment has failed dramatically. Liberally politicized professional organizations, courts and patient advocate groups, playing out compassionate fantasies based on statist ideologies, have insured the mess we have now.
2. The general erosion and breakdown of the traditional, cohesive family and societal institutions, ushered in by the Marxist changes initiated in the 60s, have been devastating to those with enough remaining ego strengths to prosper in a more orderly society. The bulk of the patients I have seen over the years would probably never have needed my services before those changes.
3. The drug epidemic, facilitated by the failed “War on Drugs” and the failed “War on Poverty,” with all their attendant corrupting influences, has caused unimaginable damage to the most vulnerable.
When I was awarded a Mead Johnson Fellowship in Public Sector Psychiatry towards the end of my residency, they sent me to the APA convention in Chicago to hob nob with others like me and with the movers and shakers in that field. My interest in the field was based on a perceived need to turn back the failed de-instituionalization movement, revamp the old private or state hospital system into a truly therapeutic force that would end the suffering and the maltreatment of the severely mentally ill now living on the streets and in the jails and prisons. How naive.
I was treated there like a leper or a naive little kid for challenging the outpatient system that had provided such lucre, prestige and power to these people. I recall my final moment of involvement in that charade, in the penthouse of some uber-plush hotel along the waterfront, quite dressed up, waiters and waitresses coming around constantly to the little cliques of movers and shakers, and the promising young fellows like me, handing us as much champagne, caviar, goose liver pate and other delicacies as we wanted. I was standing - drink and caviar in hand - with a little group of luminaries, listening to them discuss the latest legislative proposals they were backing, when I raised my glass, made an overly gleeful and loud toast to “all those homeless mentally ill,” downed the entire glass of champagne, and left, never to return. I’ve never regretted closing that door behind me.
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