The Washington Post published an article: "This is why it’s so hard to find mental health counseling right now” by Lenny Bernstein. Here are some excerpts:
Angelle Haney Gullett lost her father in September and knew she would need grief counseling. She contacted 25 therapists in the Los Angeles area, where she lives, between early October and Christmas, neatly tracking her efforts on a spreadsheet.
None would accept a new client. In most cases, their waiting lists were closed as well, even though Gullett was willing to pay hundreds of dollars in cash for each session.
“I’m in a big city. I’m in L.A. We have a lot of therapists,” she said. “So it’s just kind of wild to me that that many people are at capacity.”
It has been difficult to find mental health counseling in much of the United States for years, long before the coronavirus pandemic began. But now, after two years of unrelenting stress, turmoil and grief, many people seeking help are confronting a system at or beyond capacity, its inadequacy for this moment plainly exposed.
It is even more difficult to find specialized care for children or those with lower income.
Assistance of any kind is in short supply in rural areas, where all health-care choices are more limited than they are for residents of cities and suburbia.
Those hoping to find a Black or Latino therapist face even more limited options.
While all of those circumstances have long been true, the pandemic has significantly worsened conditions, according to mental health practitioners, officials at professional associations, people seeking care and a wide variety of data.
“It’s the worst it’s ever been,” said Kelly Roberts, director of Graduate Programs in Human Sciences at Oklahoma Christian University in Edmond. “I’ve never seen it like this.”
At Boston Medical Center, the safety net hospital for the city, staff recently began contacting parents of children who joined the 170-person wait list in April 2021 — a 10-month wait for a chance to receive services, said Christine M. Crawford, a child psychiatrist at the center who is also the associate medical director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
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