Public Service Costs

The failure of our mental health system is a nationwide crisis, with impacts felt far beyond those with a severe mental illness.

When our sickest citizens aren’t able to get care, they frequently end up in systems that weren’t designed for front-line mental health care. This relatively small group cycles repeatedly through courts, jails, hospital emergency rooms and homeless shelters. The care they receive is fragmented and uncoordinated, coming at great cost to taxpayers, often with poor outcomes.

What do these inefficiencies look like?

• ERs across the country fill with acutely ill patients waiting for a bed to open, sometimes for days or even weeks. One study found that at least 70% of ER administrators held mentally ill patients for 24 hours or longer waiting for a bed.
• Police and fire responders are increasingly diverted to mental health calls, and forced to expend enormous resources and personnel transporting psychiatric patients for evaluation or care. In 2019, the Treatment Advocacy Center released a report, Road Runners, highlighting the cost of asking law enforcement officers to be on the front lines of the mental health crisis in the United States. Nationwide, an estimated $918 million was spent by law enforcement on transporting people with severe mental illness in 2017.
  
• Individuals with diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are 10 times more likely to be in a jail or prison than a hospital bed.