It's Thursday. I'm oscar A Mirrors from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. The demand for mental health care has overwhelmed supply for most of the pandemic, and in some places like Massachusetts, the need for those services is critical. If traditional hospitals and treatment centers don't have available space for mental health services, some may need to go to the e er in what is known as emergency room boarding for psychiatric patients.
These types of stays have risen between two hundred and four percent in Massachusetts during the pandemic, and e r s are not equipped for this type of treatment. Martha b. Binger, healthcare reporter at w bu R, joins us for what to Know and one girl seventeen days stay in an e er. Thanks for joining us, Martha, thank you for having me. I'm gonna talk about an interesting piece you wrote about kids and with mental health crisis is right now.
A lot of times hospitals are overrun, they don't have enough space, and sometimes these kids have to go into e r s and in some cases they can be there quite a quite a long time. You profiled a girl named Melinda who had to spend seventy seventeen days in an e ER just really not the right setting for what she was going through. But because of y issues other places where she couldn't be placed, you know,
she had kind of tough it out through there. So Martha tell us a little bit about her ordeal and and the overall problem with uh, you know, staying in the e R s but e R boarding as they call it, right, So Melinda has anxiety and depression that really got worse during the pandemic as she grew more and more isolated. You know, her her saying lessons stopped. She was going to school virtually, she was seeing therapist, but that all switched to virtual sessions as well, and
she just wasn't connecting. So she had four trips to the e R starting last December, in instances where she threatened to kill herself, and the one where she ended up spending seventeen days in the e ER started in April. What happened was she got there and all of the psyche beds for kids in Massachusetts and surrounding states were full.
Because we're seeing a lot of increasing demand for mental health care and and really extreme cases where where children are threatening to harm themselves, and so all of the
units are full. And in addition, during COVID, many of the psyche beds have been converted to to COVID where they needed them, or they had been switched from double rooms to single so there was there was kind of a shrinking of of space that for to take care of these kids with psychiatric needs and more demand, and Melinda ended up kind of caught in that bottleneck, waiting
seventeen days to be placed in a bed. You know, in a lot of time, there's an individual a lot of individual care that these patients need, and Melinda wasn't getting that for her first ten days in the hospital. Was kind of I guess you described this lecture hall with a dozen other kids on gurneys, is just separated by curtains and whatnot, and it's just tough to get kind of get the treatment that you need. By the time you caught up with her, she was already in
there for twelve days in the e er. Tell me how that went well. She wasn't getting any care in the e er, But that's not unusual emergency rooms. They're kind of the place where you just assess the problem and then move on. So you know, if you break your arm, they might fix that in the emergency room. If you have a heart attack, they're very likely going to move you up to someplace in the hospital where
you can get care for that. But if you have psychiatric need and there's no space, you just sit there because emergency rooms aren't set up to provide any therapy, any psychiatric analysis, anything like that. And so Melinda just started to spiral downward, you know. She she eventually got moved out of that lecture hall into a small room off of the emergency room. But again, like she was. She she was sitting on a gurney, no furniture in the room, wasn't allowed to have her phone except for
maybe an hour a day. Um, she she wasn't getting any treatment, so she just got worse and worse, which meant that she had some behavior problems. She was screaming at staff sometimes, she threatened to escape one time, and that it made her harder to place. So it turned into this kind of catch twenty two because the hospitals didn't want this girl who was acting out, but she was acting out because she had been stuck in the space. You were also able to make contact with her mother, Pam.
And you know, as the days were progressing, you know, she said, the longer that her daughter Melinda is there, the more she's starting to decline. And basically what you were just describing, she was lashing out, and and that just complicates everything from then on out. Yeah, I mean, Pam, Pam could see that, um, other children who were more docile than her daughter were getting placed more quickly. Um, people who didn't complain seem to be getting placed more quickly.
But the and the hospital administrators will tell you, look, we have to sort of assess who's coming in to be sure they were going to be a good fit for a program. We don't want to take in somebody who we think is going to kind of disrupt the care that we're trying to provide for other people in the unit. But it it becomes a very difficult situation for for mental health patients who aren't you know, quote
unquote well behaved. Milinda and Pam, we're both doing like audio diaries, so we're able to kind of hear from Melinda and her own words what was going on. And she said that she wished in a lot of cases that someone would just understand her she really couldn't get across anybody how bad things were for her. Yeah, No, she's she's had a very hard time, um what during the pandemic, especially finding people who she felt she could um explain the stresses that she was under and get
some help. I mean, I think she also describes that she just had way too much unstructured time to kind of ruminate in her head, you know, to sort of get stuck in these loops of of negative thinking that um, really, we're not healthy, we're not helping her or or anybody else. And that's unfortunately something that we're hearing from from a lot of kids who have been stuck at home during the pandemic. You know, we're talking about Melinda and her
and her struggle here and her mother, Pam. You know, obviously this is just one example of it. But this emergency reomboarding of psychiatric patients, uh, they say have has risen between two hundred and four monthly in Massachusetts during the pandemic. So this is just kind of a snapshot of what's happening. But this is happening in a lot
of places to a lot of people. Uh. Following along with the story, you know, it wasn't until day seventeen that Melinda was in all of this that she was finally going to be taken away and placed into another program where she would be able to stay for two weeks. They adjusted her medication and she started to see a little bit of change finally. Yeah, Melinda has been not completely stable um since she's been home. UM, but she's definitely doing better. I mean, some of her therapy is
back in person. UM. It's possible that the medication adjustments made at the hospital helped. She's had some she's got some additional therapy. She's got a therapeutic mentor now, so somebody who kind of walks through the world with her a little bit, helping her avoid the trigger points that that used to kind of send her into these downward spirals. So she's got some additional assistance and UM, the family is very hopeful that that the that the summer will
will go well for her. Is the hope that now that the pandemic is easing in some cases that this would get better in these e R boarding stays, UH, the won't won't last as long anymore. In the other hospital beds can open up. Is that the hope now or is there other stuff being done to to limit this kind of thing. Well, I think there's a lot of uncertainty about that, because the numbers of kids boarding in Massachusetts have not started to drop yet, even though,
as you said, the pandemic conditions are easing. So it's possible that we have a backlog of these mental health cases that UM need to be addressed. Honestly, people don't really know what to expect in the next few months. There are some efforts to try to take care of kids more at home, to try to offer some urgent care in the community, UM, to open up some psyche beds that are not actually in hospitals but in more
like halfway houses. There are some things underway to try to reduce the numbers, but it's still pretty tough in Massachusetts and in many states right now. Well, I mean, I hope that all these people, all the kids especially, can get the help that they need and not have to kind of languish there in the e r s because it's just not the setting that that they need to be in to get the proper help. So hopefully we can bring some awareness to all of this and
and conditions can get better. Martha B. Binger, healthcare reporter at w B you are thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm Oscar Ramrrors and this has been reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday Friday. So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast