When more costs less: more and better psychiatric care reduces overall costs

An opinion piece in the New York Times, (8/3/13) by Christine Montross entitled "The Woman Who Ate Cutlery" illustrates the point that trying to save money by making care and treatment for people with mental illness less accessible, does not save anything. Emergency rooms become the only available treatment venue in a crisis - a poor substitute for preventive care before a crisis develops, hospitalizations increase, and sometimes lives are lost.

Problems in the the system of care for people with mental illness often parallel those for people with developmental disabilities. There are many people with developmental disabilities who have unusual and sometimes dangerous behaviors, with the added complication that the person's capacity to communicate their frustrations make it even more difficult to know how to relieve their distress. There are also people with DD whose medical problems, when not addressed early or treated appropriately, can land them in the emergency department with the result that the person receives too little or too much treatment that is almost always more costly than it needs to be.

In "The Woman Who Ate Cutlery", "M" is an extreme case - a woman who ingests knives and forks and other sharp objects and inserts objects and substances into her body to relieve stress caused by mental illness. 

According to the article:

• "If M had insurance, or enough money to pay out of pocket, she might see a therapist every week for an hour and a psychiatrist once or twice a month. Instead, she’s treated by an overextended, publicly funded mental-health center where she sees a psychiatrist for 20 minutes, four times a year. Not surprisingly, her symptoms persist and she is hospitalized again and again."
• "…Our failure to provide a critical, basic level of outpatient psychiatric care to the mentally ill creates a volatile cycle in which uninsured or underinsured patients avail themselves of treatment only when they are in crisis. This is analogous to refusing to treat hypertensive patients — or to monitor their blood pressure — unless they show up in the E.R. after having had a stroke."
• "…If M had a regular outpatient psychiatrist, she could call him or her in these moments of distress, schedule an urgent appointment, and obtain treatment and care from a simple phone call. But M does not have a relationship with a provider; she has a relationship with an institution. And the institution requires that M be in imminent danger in order to be treated."
• "…According to Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, president of the national nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center, 'Assisted outpatient treatment has proven to reduce psychiatric hospitalizations by more than 70 percent.'"

Montross concludes, "…we will need to place new societal value on the importance of mental health. Until accessible, affordable mental-health care is a universal right, too many psychiatric patients will continue to receive the reactionary, crisis-driven care that is all our emergency rooms are equipped to provide."