(Oct. 28, 2014) Marty Naftel once spent nine hours in the emergency room waiting for a psychiatric bed to open up but was ultimately sent home without treatment for his bipolar disorder (“Psych patients pack emergency rooms," Orange County Register,” Oct. 25).
Naftel’s experience is not uncommon. Sharp decreases in psychiatric beds spurred by deinstitutionalization have turned emergency rooms across the country into warehouses for people with mental illness in crisis.
The practice, called “psychiatric boarding” is the santitized term for keeping psych patients waiting in the ER for days, or sometimes months.
“I’m hearing from all over the state about ERs being overrun by psych patients,” says Randall Hagar, director of government relations at the California Psychiatric Association in Sacramento. “I’ve heard stories many times about the difficulty of finding placement for individuals. They can be kept in the ER three, four, five, even up to seven days.”
Warehousing patients like this has had far reaching consequences, leaving fewer ER beds available for the public while psychiatric patients do not get the timely and necessary medical care they would have received in a treatment facility.
The practice is so contentious that Washington recently made boarding illegal. While Washington’s decision that patients cannot be warehoused in ER rooms is a humanitarian one, but it also means that authorities will have to find a suitable treatment facility for people in a psychiatric crisis.
While California isn't considering making the practice illegal, the state should still provide suitable treatment facilities for people like Naftel.
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