Let’s talk about how mental health care sucks in Arizona.
I came from Massachusetts, and I remember moving here and wondering, “is something in the water here?” because mental health seemed significantly worse than anything I saw in training.
I didn’t realize I came from a place rating #1 in the availability of behavioral health workers (psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, counselors, NPs..) to #47. Yeah, that’s right. Arizona has been ranked as #47 by America’s Health Rankings in this regard.
We really only have 146 mental health providers for every 100,000 people in the state. More strikingly, there are 11 psychiatrists for every 100,000 people in our state. We have the lowest amount of psychiatric beds available in the country at 14.8 per 100,000.
For access to mental health professionals specific to youth, we rank #49 in the entire country.
Make sense why you can’t get seen anywhere – or how difficult it is to find a prescriber/therapist for your kiddo?
Considering that mental health treatment here is sparse, but also expensive, it makes sense that a lot of people are not able to receive treatment. When only about 56% of psychiatrists accept any form of private insurance (in comparison to 90% of other physicians who do not specialize in mental health), it becomes obvious that people genuinely cannot afford to initiate or maintain treatment. Most of us have to seek care out of network of our insurance companies because what other choice do we have?
In all honesty from an insider perspective, insurance companies pay us like shit. I could easily charge $500 for an evaluation or $200 for a follow up. Private insurance companies give me maybe $150 (or less) for an evaluation and $40-$80 for a follow up.
To be fair, psychiatry is hard. It makes sense that there would be a shortage of us because we hear, see, and experience a lot of suffering compared to other specialties. Often times, it is hard to see progress when you can’t medicate or therapize poverty, abuse and institutional discrimination. The suicide rate for our profession is high. In fact, it’s one of the higher suicide rates among various professions.
The problem goes a lot deeper than the shortage.
Good ol’ Doug Douchey hasn’t done very much for this lovely state of ours. I’ll give him credit for signing telemedicine into permanence in our state. But mental health can’t be fixed by just investing into telemedicine, a few mental health agencies or suicide prevention programs.
If we aren’t investing into public health and education, then we are pretty much fucked for mental health.
I’m from Massachusetts right? Well, AZ spends less than a 5th of what Massachusetts does on public health – and our population is significantly larger here. I won’t even start on the differences on education budgets.
In turn, we are going to see more kids ending up in DCS custody because their parents are unable to support them. Because they could never break the cycle of addiction, abuse, or poverty that they were born into.
We are going to see bullying in schools, racism, higher drop out rates and teen pregnancy.
We are going to see higher rates of unemployment and difficulty finding affordable housing.
We see higher stress rates, and more illness.
We see that Douggie cares more about kissing Donald Trump’s ass and pretending COVID isn’t a problem, and supporting “freedom” of Americans not to wear masks – instead of protecting vulnerable populations.
While our death rate rose, he sat on TV and argued with reporters about how AZ was doing well. That motherfucker got vaccinated real quick, but then banned cities, states, counties and state agencies from requiring a vaccine passport to obtain services/enter specific areas.
Are you fucking kidding me?
We’ve had 907,000 cases of COVID, and 18,114 deaths in Arizona to date – and rising. How many people are grieving? 18,000+ families and friends are grieving.
There is a blatant disregard for human life that is present in our state.
Starting to get why mental health isn’t a priority to Arizona?
Yeah.
Same.
