Destitute crazies flood American emergency rooms

More destitute crazies than ever before roam the streets of America, hungry, homeless and losing it, but Mariana Tosca's biggest fear is a blogger 4000 miles away *rolls eyes*

And remember, Mariana brags in her online biography about setting up the Los Angeles homeless coalition (no evidence whatsoever of such an organization existing or Mariana having anything to do with it), yet she would rather spend all her money on a maliciously frivolous lawsuit instead of helping those she claims to want to help, the homeless.

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On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.

"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.

Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."

Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.

This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.

"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

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Visits to the hospital's psychiatric emergency department have climbed 20 percent in the past three years.

"We've seen actually more very serious suicide attempts in that population than we had in the past as well," she said.

Compounding the problem are patients with chronic mental illness who have been hurt by a squeeze on mental health services and find themselves with nowhere to go.

On top of that, doctors are seeing some cases where the patient's most critical need is a warm bed.

"The more I see these patients, the more I realize that if it's sleeting and raining outside, the emergency room is the only place they have," said Dr. R. Corey Waller, director of the Spectrum Health Medical Group Center for Integrative Medicine in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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If the economy doesn't improve, next year could be worse because many community mental health agencies are cutting programs and using up reserve funds, says Linda Rosenberg, president of the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare.

"It's been horrible," she said. "Those that need it the most - the unemployed, those with tremendous family stress - have no insurance."

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California cut $587 million in state-funded mental health services in the past two years, the most of any state, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a patient advocacy group.

http://news.yahoo.com/mentally-ill-flood-er-states-cut-services-131133880.html