Difficulty in Getting Help
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I n the United States, it oftentimes can take months to get an appointment with a psychiatrist. What about going to the emergency room if you're feeling suicidal? Understaffed. There may only be one social worker on the entire scene.
"Why?" you may ask yourself. "Why is it so difficult to get treatment?"
Well... there's a lot of reasons. Let's go into them, shall we?
Short-Staffed
The U.S. is massively short-staffed in mental health professionals. This is especially true for psychiatrists, as was mentioned earlier. You see, to become a psychiatrist, you need to get full doctorate. But, psychiatrists get paid considerably less than regualar doctors do. So, naturally, they choose to become regular doctors instead. Because there are nearly no psychiatrists, the vast majority of those seeking help don't even have proper access to it.
The huge wait times for getting proper help are a huge deterrent for people, especially those who lack hope and motivation.
This is true of other mental health specialists as well. Wait times for therapists can also be within months, and emergency rooms often don't have mental health specialists on call for those who come in for suicidal tendencies. In fact, oftentimes teens who go to the emergency room for self-harm and suicidal reasons have a higher chance afterwards of getting hospitalized later. The huge wait times for getting proper help are a huge deterrent for people, especially those who lack hope and motivation. There are also a lot of channels to go through when seeking treatment, which can also cause people to eventually give up on the process.
It's also difficult to get treatment in rural areas, because people have to travel so far for it.
The Stigma
The first real step fixing this problem is the stop the stigma.
Even if people can get treatment, oftentimes, they don't even want to.
See, there's a huge stigma over mental illness. People tend to look down on those with mental illness, seeing them as simply just "insane," or "crazy." Now, of course, this isn't true (or at least, is a massive oversimplification of a very complex issue), but these ideas are still stuck in people's minds. Worrying that they may be judged by their peers, many people choose not to seek treatment. They see their problems as insignificant—"all in your head"—not severe enough for treatment. Many people don't even realize that they have mental health problems (especially those with personality disorders). Imagine how hard it would then be to remedy the illness. So, the first real step fixing this problem is the stop the stigma. People need to know about the problem to fix it, and how are we supposed to do that if these issues keep getting ignored?