EDITORIAL: Mental health: Growing needs met with short supply

Aug. 22—An in-depth report in last Sunday's Free Press on the mental health landscape made it clear that the need for mental health services is growing due in part to pandemic-related stress while the system to respond to it is being strained.

The system had flaws to begin with. The pandemic has wrought significant challenge to healthy minds. There has been a vast increase of mental health needs — from young people who've been isolated from school and normal social development, to middle age people and seniors.

Isolation, depression and anxiety increased as our social order turned upside down with the pandemic. Kids couldn't go to school, seniors had to isolate and everyone had to change the way they worked and the way they played.

Local practitioners find themselves busier than ever, while at the same time dealing with their own pandemic-related mental health stressors. Minnesota's mental health services are understaffed and underfunded an in need of more attention. Sue Abderholden, statewide director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, says the mental system isn't broken — it was never really built to serve the need.

There's a shortage of practitioners. And clinics and hospitals have dropped mental health services due to low reimbursement rates that the insurance companies don't want to raise. Government has been slow with solutions also.

There are 23,431 mental health care providers in Minnesota. That comes out to about one provider for every 240 people. Of course, there are more providers located in the metro areas, making access for people in rural areas difficult. One provider in The Free Press report told of a man who traveled from Gaylord to attend a Mankato support group.

People who live in rural areas of Minnesota travel an average of 77 minutes to get to a mental health provider, compared to 24 minutes for metro area patients, according to a report from the Minnesota Department of Health.

In a sign of progress, it appears the stigma of dealing with a mental health issues is slowly easing, mostly led by young people, many of whom may have been on "meds" since their teenage years. In another sign of progress, state officials quickly equalized reimbursement rates for telemedicine when the pandemic hit.

But there's plenty of hill left to climb.

The Free Press will continue with its occasional series "Hidden Crisis" and explore problems of access, knowledge of services, reimbursement, growing the supply of providers and stigma issues in future installments.

We aim to inform community and state policy leaders on problems with the mental health system and advocate for solutions, but the first step is getting everyone with a stake in mental health — all of us — to realize the scope of the problem.

___

(c)2021 The Free Press (Mankato, Minn.)

Visit The Free Press (Mankato, Minn.) at www.mankatofreepress.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.