The crisis in children’s mental health care is seen at all levels, but especially in the 24-bed psychiatric ward at Rady Children’s Hospital.

In a recent interview, Dr. Benjamin Maxwell, interim director of the hospital’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department, said:

“There is already a crisis in childhood mental health, and the pandemic has amplified it,” adds Dr. Willow Jenkins, psychiatrist and director of Laidy’s Emergency Behavioral Health Unit.

She said treatment beds are always full, not just at Reidy, but at several other facilities that can accommodate children. Children often spend time in nonpsychiatric wards waiting for space.

“When you show up in the emergency room, you don’t go to the inpatient ward that day. That’s impossible,” Jenkins said.

Both said the hospital could manage by treating children elsewhere in the hospital, so children in need would not be kicked out any time soon.

Rady is not alone. Peer facilities across the country often report even more serious capacity problems. In December 2021, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued recommendations on the United States’ “Youth Mental Health Crisis,” calling the situation critical and broad enough to attract public attention. I have. mental health.

But big plans take time to deliver results, and many broad solutions are still years away. For example, Rady is working with the county on a major expansion plan, but won’t break ground until 2025.

On the one hand, it is clear that many children do not get what they need. A survey of 1,200 California students in 2020 and her 2021 found that 68% felt they may need mental health services but aren’t getting them. Sources of stress ranged from family and financial pressures to peers and friends missing during the pandemic.

Broad solutions aren’t coming soon, but some organizations are doing what they can to scale their programs in the meantime.

San Diego’s Episcopal Community Services recently announced an expansion of its Para Las Familias program to serve underresourced families in San Ysidro with the help of nearly $250,000 in county grants. received her $1 million grant from the Rest Haven Children’s Health Fund to add capacity to existing services serving children in need of mental health care.

According to psychologist Moises Baron, director of the San Diego Center for Children, the need has been hit hardest for families with the fewest resources.

“The pandemic didn’t cause this situation, but it made it worse,” Barron said. “It may be weeks, if not months, before their children are eligible for commercial insurance.

Charities are increasingly working to fill this gap. For example, in 2017, the David C. Copley Foundation donated his $5 million, plus another $1 million from a fundraising event by local philanthropist Ernest Reidy, making it the first since its opening in 2020. Built a psychiatric emergency department in an overcrowded hospital.

San Diego’s Price Philanthropies has also focused on children’s mental health issues for years. Expanding training opportunities, helping the University of California, San Diego to create a graduate fellowship program for nurse practitioners focused on mental health care for children and adolescents.

The latest grant focuses on increasing treatment capacity outside hospitals and emergency rooms as soon as possible.

Elizabeth Fitzsimons, chief executive officer of Episcopal Community Services, said the organization’s Para Las Familias program has traditionally provided bilingual mental health services to children under the age of five, but the county’s subsidies have made it difficult. He said he could extend it to 12 years old with help. She said the additional resources will allow counselors to serve families, including older siblings, who are affected by a variety of stressful situations, from parental unemployment and divorce to neglect and domestic violence. I said it would be like this.

Fitzsimmons said, “We’ve found that when we come out of the pandemic, children are experiencing a lot of extra stress in their families, especially if they don’t have a lot of financial resources.

She added that additional funding is needed to boost the program’s overall capacity from 300 to 350.

Rest Haven, an organization first established to treat children with tuberculosis in the early 1900s, considers the current state of children’s mental health to be dire and is one of the largest in its history. , and has allocated $1 million to the already operational San Diego Center for Children. Extensive mental health care programs throughout the region.

Cass Kaminetz, executive director of Rest Haven, said the proposal for the Center for Children builds on the organization’s already extensive work in partnership with Rady to serve children. That history has given the board confidence, she said.

“The idea was already there, it was a proven concept. They just needed a kickstart to get it going, and I think that’s something that really resonated with the board.

Plans include launching new mental health access programs, expanding existing outpatient services, and expanding intensive services such as partial admissions and other “step-down” services for children who have recently been treated in hospital. It is included.

The grant is expected to expand capacity for approximately 1,450 young people annually.

Barron said funding isn’t the only difficulty in expanding mental health care programs. A severe labor shortage limits outreach efforts, but the new program uses “peer support specialists” and master’s degree-level graduates who need clinical experience to become licensed therapists and rapidly increase As a way to expand. A bill signed in 2020 allows licensing for peer support workers, and Barron said the access program will use the new law to expand care on base.

“We need to do a better job of identifying what they can do, some of the preventive activities they can do, training them and being able to supervise them to provide that level of care. There is a Baron
Said. “Not everyone needs to see a psychiatrist or psychologist. We need to do a better job of making sure we have good matches.”

“The idea already existed, it was a proven concept, but we needed a kickstart to bring it to life.”