.jpg)
Opinion: Hopelessness around youth mental health is creating a ‘nihilistic contagion’
I have been a child psychiatrist for more than 20 years. I’ve worked in the city, in the suburbs, and in rural settings. I’ve seen patients in teaching hospitals and I’ve run a busy private practice. In all that time, I have never seen psychiatric suffering as pervasive and intractable as I have over the last 18 months. The lack of real change in our nation’s child and adolescent mental health infrastructure has fostered a pernicious and pervasive defeatism among patients and clinicians alike.
At its worst, this is manifest as a boarding crisis for young people with mental illnesses, who are simply being warehoused in general hospitals. Allowing children and adolescents to languish for days, and often weeks, while waiting in general hospitals for a psychiatric bed to become available is a recipe for patients and caregivers to lose all hope that things will ever improve.
