Erika Edwards – NBC News Aug 16, 2023
Three influential groups of pediatricians and emergency medicine providers are pleading for more support and resources as the number of children and teenagers with mental health concerns overwhelm emergency departments nationwide.
“The scope of this problem is really great,” said Dr. Mohsen Saidinejad, a professor of emergency medicine and pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But our ability to solve it is not there.”
Saidinejad is the lead author of a joint policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the Emergency Nurses Association released Wednesday. The groups are calling for local communities to increase access to mental health services before emergency care is needed.
Every year, approximately half a million children with mental or behavioral health conditions are evaluated in emergency departments, according to the AAP. That number increased over the past decade, experts said.
Dr. Willough Jenkins, medical director of emergency and consultation liaison psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, is on the front line of the surge
She said that the number of kids seeking psychiatric emergency care in her ER has grown from approximately 30 a month in recent years to 30 a day.
“The volume is astronomical, and I don’t know that people fully understand how many people are struggling,” said Jenkins, who was not involved with the new policy statement.
Jenkins said that children as young as six are coming in, often talking about suicide.
“This crisis is only getting worse,” she said. “It’s not getting better.”
A nationwide mental health problem
The call for help comes as the number of children and teenagers with mental health problems skyrockets. A February study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, found an “unprecedented level of hopelessness” and suicidal thoughts among the nation’s youth.
“The bulk of these children are coming in with depression, anxiety and trauma,” Jenkins said.
But emergency departments are not set up to handle mental health crises.
Emergency physicians are highly equipped to handle situations that need immediate attention: gunshot wounds, shattered bones, heart attacks. While they may be able to address mental health issues at a basic level, Saidinejad said that emergency staffs typically do not have the resources to manage such long-term cases.
Emergency departments “already have challenges with being understaffed and under-resourced,” Saidinejad said. “Now we’re adding to this a huge element of an increasing number of children — younger and younger, by the way, as young as five — who are coming in with mental health complaints.”
“All we can do is provide screening and identify those who are at higher risk. At the end of the day, we need a mental health provider to do definitive care,” he said.
The groups’ joint policy statement recommended several courses of action:
- Develop community-based teams that can respond to pediatric mental health crises in schools, doctors’ offices and homes.
- Add pediatric mental health professionals to emergency departments.
- Support emergency department staff with information specific to groups at high risk for mental health concerns: victims of abuse, post-traumatic stress, depression and LGBTQ youth.
“Children and adolescents deserve the best care when they come to the emergency department during a mental or behavioral health crisis, as anyone does. But many times, a lack of resources can complicate matters,” Terry Foster, president of the Emergency Nurses Association, said in a press release. “An increase in treatment education and resources can only continue to improve the care provided for not just youth, but all mental and behavioral health patients.”
May the lowered eligibility for vaccination have something to do with it?
@ HP
NOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Unpossible!
The shots are safe and effective dontcha know.
I wonder how man of them are jews
Isn’t it obvious. Mental health is the new growth industry. Remember don’t stand between Jew capitalism and its profits.
Wonder if the Trans-JEW-LGBTFRUITLOOP movement has a great deal to do with it…..
here in the UK
Children as young as five have transvestites coming into school some dredsed as witches
to talk to the kids about other sexualities
such as homosexual activities
This perversion gums up kids development and disturbs them
this indcotrination goes on until they leave and is continued at Uni with deep socialist over tomes
the result a generation of messed up kids
All that tells me is the plans of the predator class are chugging right along. The covid-1984 war on citizens launched by criminal cartels posing as governments were a major mind fuck to the impressionable. They were isolated from each other, barred from normal activity, diapers strapped to their mugs, idiotic plastic shields put up around them, ordered to “distance”, and led to believe other people were virus-spewing threats to their lives. Then they were told the salvation was in a syringe, in the form of a “vaccine” that was actually Satan’s piss, a highly toxic concoction meant to destroy people.
They have been gaslit with a non-stop barrage of self-loathing in the form of critical race theory and other criminally insane bad ideas. At the same time, they have been hit with a barrage of gender dysphoria and forced to bow down at to the Cult of the Depraved Degenerate. Forced to recognized some confused narcissistic asshole’s “preferred pronouns” even when they had no basis in reality. This has culminated in a shocking number of imbeciles who can’t tell what gender they are even when looking down the inside of their pants or standing naked in front of a mirror.
Don’t even get me started on the degeneracy that is the majority of “social media”.
Throw in all the quack corrupt drug factory “doctors” who have been prescribing all sorts of mind-melting toxic chemicals to the young, dispensing destructive and addictive anti-anxiety pills rather then having children actually live and learn, and when they need to experience some natural anxiety to know how to adjust and f*cking deal with it.
The 50 f*cking injections of toxic sludge before they are even 6 years old is not only insanely recklessly dangerous, the regimen has spawned an explosion of “autism”, which is basically chemically induced mental/behavioral retardation.
We could go on and on.
Umbra Bellator this is why i avoid the public now. The grown ups are losing the plot left right and centre too. Avoid.
this Hitler wanted to beware of the white race .
so the stupid brits better grip their own nose
still worshiping this jewish alcoholic pedopederast
and mass murderer Winston Churchill .
A solid dose of antisemitism is the first step on the road to recovery of mental health.
Anybody who doesn’t hate Jews should be placed on suicide watch, due to extreme cognitive dissonance.
The occult drag queens, trans-mutants, witches, warlocks are NPCs strategically positioned to rock the boat of the damned to the beat of the master drummer until it flips the gentile cargo into the burning lake.
The condemned goyim sense it coming, thus the severity of the mental issues.
The children’s senses are more finely attuned because they are not as proficient in self-deception as adults.
A hundred thousand exorcists would be strained to a breaking point despite double shifts.