60 Minutes Highlights Lack of Care for Kids in Crisis

Sixty Minutes aired a powerful piece last night about an urgent lack of mental health care for young people in crisis. The figure at the center of the piece was Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds, whose still-livid scars bear witness to the problem. Four weeks earlier, Sen. Deeds’ 24-year-old son Gus, who had struggled with bipolar disorder for years, had slashed his father’s face and stabbed him repeatedly, just hours after being turned away from the local hospital because there were no psychiatric beds available. Then Gus Deeds killed himself with a hunting rifle.

Senator Deeds’ frustration was echoed by other parents, including a support group of seven Connecticut mothers of seriously ill children who testified to a similar “revolving door” care since insurance usually pays only when a child is at “imminent” risk of hurting himself or someone else—for no more than 3 or 4 days. And when they are released there’s nowhere for them to go but home.

The lack of beds leaves the ER as the last resort for many. “Every day, we have 10 to 20 kids with psychiatric problems come into our emergency department, kids who wanna kill themselves, who’ve tried to kill themselves, who’ve tried to kill somebody else,” says a nurse-practitioner at the Yale-New Haven Hospital. “We have 52 psychiatric beds here at Yale. And right now, all 52 are full. And so the seven kids that are here in the emergency room are waiting for an open bed.”

Among those seven when he was interviewed was a 17-year-old who hears voices who had slashed his own face. His father, in tears, said the ER was his only option; he had called a psychiatrist but was told there was a three-month wait for an appointment.

Creigh Deeds sums up the segment when he says, “There’s just a lack of equity in the way we as a society, and certainly as a government and insurance industry, medical industry, with the way we look at mental health issues.”

Or as 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley paraphrases: “Don’t want to fund it. Don’t want to talk about it. Don’t want to see it.”

The segment ends with this fact: “Nationwide, since 2008, states have cut $4.5 billion from mental health care funding.” You can see it here.