Mental health effort benefits us all

The issue keeps surfacing in various forms: the spotty effectiveness of our system for offering mental health care. It is perhaps most dramatically entwined with the horrors of mass shootings. In the aftermath of one, it usually becomes clear that the perpetrator was an angry, unstable person afflicted with some sort of mental illness.

And in recent weeks, discussion of depression has flared in the wake of celebrity suicides.

Now we learn through a report made by Hearst Connecticut Media in a partnership with the Connecticut Health I-Team, www.c-hit.org. citing multiple studies, that low-income and minority women are less likely to get treatment for depression.

According to experts, what’s keeping this particular group of women from getting help is an increasingly familiar litany of obstacles: no insurance, the cost of treatment, a shortage of qualified clinicians and stigma.

And, more targeted to this low-income, minority female demographic, add the fear of losing custody of their children, according to Megan Smith, an associate professor of psychiatry with the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine. She runs the Mental Health Outreach for Mothers Partnership, a program that offers mental health services to “overburdened and under-resourced mothers.”

The Connecticut Behavioral Health Partnership, for instance, found that women were underrepresented in Medicaid-funded behavioral health services in Connecticut, even though data show women suffer from the most commonly diagnosed mental health disorders more frequently than men.

White women, according to data from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, use mental health services at more than twice the rate of black or Hispanic women even though blacks and Hispanics are more likely to report psychological distress than non-Hispanic whites.

The rates increase dramatically for minorities who live in poverty, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And Medicaid does not reimburse clinicians for the full cost of mental health treatment. A 2015 study, for example, found that Connecticut clinicians experience a $27 million annual loss versus standard fees when providing mental health care under Medicaid.

So it comes as no shock that there’s a shortage of providers who accept Medicaid.

Connecticut faces many pressing needs. In the crush of them — budget deficits, transportation woes, among others — this relatively low-profile problem of access to mental health drags along.

There is no clear or easy solution. But it’s going to require consideration and action on a number of fronts to hack a path through the tangled thicket of cost, insurance, fear of stigma and so on.

From Washington on down, efforts have to continue to expand insurance coverage for every person.

To those who argue the cost is too great, we’d offer the words of Dr. F. Carl Mueller, associate chair of psychiatry at Stamford Health.

“Depression kills income,” he said in the I-Team report. Treating depression, he added, is helpful to avoiding lost wages and even lost jobs.

The winners from increased attention to mental health issues are not only people who would benefit from treatment, but all the rest of us, too.

Depression kills income