What’s making the mental health care crisis even worse
The recent announcement by Lehigh Valley Health Network of its plans for a new behavioral health inpatient facility, following last year’s opening of a mental and behavioral health unit by St Luke’s University Health Network, are welcome developments for our community and illustrate the growing need to include mental and behavioral health care in our society’s overall approach to addressing post-pandemic health needs.
For the last two years KidsPeace has been sounding the alarm on an impending mental health crisis in the U.S. and here in the Lehigh Valley.
It’s clear that one of the impacts of COVID-19 has been a dramatic rise in the number of people reporting issues with their mental and emotional health:
■ Last fall a Pew Charitable Trust analysis concluded 40% of American adults surveyed experienced high levels of psychological distress at least one time during the pandemic; among younger adults that figure is closer to 60%.
■ Meanwhile, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in February found that in 2021, 30% of teenage girls reported having seriously contemplated suicide in the last year.
■ This issue isn’t bypassing our community. As our area’s leading provider of mental and behavioral health services to children, KidsPeace has seen increases since 2020 in the number and severity of mental health issues present in the kids for whom we care.
In response, we’ve been proud to work with health care providers serving the Lehigh Valley on initiatives to improve access to the care that individuals in our community need to grow, thrive and succeed.
KidsPeace serves as a clinical training site for St. Luke’s and LVHN’s psychiatry residency and fellowship programs and for DeSales University’s nursing, physician assistant and nurse practitioner programs.
We provide needed referral opportunities for their Lehigh Valley patients who can benefit most from the offerings in our continuum of mental health care services.
And we’re evolving our programs to meet emerging needs — such as a new program in Berks County for autism-focused foster care and a partnership with Lehigh County to enhance our free walk-in assessments for youth and family in crisis.
These collaborative efforts are important in meeting the increasing need. But we still need to address as a society the fundamental barrier to providing effective mental health services: the limited supply of an interested and qualified workforce.
Decades of underfunding of mental health services, combined with COVID-19’s impact on employment trends in general, continue to contribute to tightness in the behavioral health workforce — a workforce that is inadequate to support existing services, let alone new and expanded ones.
Gov. Josh Shapiro can support the enhancement of care in our community and the state by reestablishing the mental health roundtable initiative started by Gov. Tom Wolf in 2020 and making it part of a comprehensive strategy to work with regional stakeholders to bring attention and resources to the critical issue of mental health workforce development within Pennsylvania.
Additionally, a recognition of the need to prioritize this issue at the federal level could provide resources to workforce stabilization efforts and ensure that service development and expansion in this critical aspect of health care continue to be realized in communities like the Lehigh Valley.
More programming, more capacity and more recognition that mental health care is health care are all positive developments.
But in the long run, without adequate workforce development initiatives in tandem with these service expansions, those in need in our community will not get the help they need and deserve.