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Expand Mental Health Access

America needs to expand mental health access to everyone. Too many people are experiencing increased anxiety and depression during the pandemic. Some of it is our country’s leadership and the upcoming election.  Certainly, social distancing and isolation aggravate mental health issues. Vulnerable people need mental health access. Ken Duckworth is the medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Recently, he sad, “It’s also really important to remember that one in five Americans had a diagnosed mental health condition before the pandemic.“

Those people still need access to mental health care. Duckworth stressed the importance of telehealth services and phone sessions for people without internet access. “Pain shared is pain halved,” said Duckworth.

Dr. Tyish Hall Brown is a psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor at Howard University College of Medicine. She recently emphasized that people should often check on the mental health of children and teens.
“Everything’s kind of a catastrophic thought” for teens, she said. She reminds us that it helpful to remind them that this break from in-person classes and seeing friends won’t last forever. Hall Brown advised parents to keep track of changes in their children’s behavior and share any concerns with a doctor.
Of course, the Trump Virus will upset American citizens until people adopt recommended public health measures: social distancing, avoiding large indoor gatherings, hand-washing, mask-wearing, rapid testing and quarantining the sick.
“We have to figure out how to deal with this as a whole country because as long as there are cases happening in any part, we still have transit, especially now we have students going back to college,” said Dr. Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Any cases anywhere really keep risk pretty high all across the entirety of the United States.”