EDITORIAL: State offers a down payment on an escalating crisis in mental health

May 12—It's hard these days to turn around without encountering legitimate fears about the state of Americans' mental health. You hear it from school officials, from health leaders and, now, from the governor of New York. That's a sign: When the state pours $1 billion of new money into mental health care, it's because of demand. If it's not a crisis, it's one in the making.

The causes run the gamut. For children, especially, social media and online bullying are significant factors. Other issues include performance pressures, unemployment, abuse of alcohol and drugs, family dissolution and other stressful events. And those factors only exacerbate any genetic predisposition to mental illness.

The need is glaring. At Erie County Medical Center, CEO Thomas Quatroche has raised an alarm about high-demand and low funding for psychiatric hospital beds. As the largest safety net mental health emergency department in the Buffalo Niagara region, ECMC sees an average of about 9,000 to 10,000 mental health patients annually. Gov. Kathy Hochul has noted studies showing that 41% of American adults and 60% of those between the ages of 18 and 29 have experienced "psychological distress."

How surprising can this be? Americans are living in a time of high stress. Repeated mass shootings, many of them targeting students, draw little more than a shrug from politicians, even allegations that the survivors were "crisis actors." A lethal, once-in-a-century pandemic produced historic levels of isolation, with students again prominently among the sufferers. A vaccination with the power to ease the crisis was politicized, increasing the death count and prolonging the crisis. Through it all, media outlets such as Fox News made billions of dollars by widening public divisions — even to the point of spreading lies.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that we would end up here, needing a huge public investment in mental health care, especially given that for decades, New York reneged on a key component of its 1970s policy of deinstitutionalization. The promise of that program was to move patients who didn't require hospital care into less costly, more appropriate outpatient services.

The state accomplished the first part quickly enough, but never followed through on providing the community care. As a result, police have become first responders to mental health calls, sometimes with tragic consequences. In his push for a new jail, Erie County Sheriff John C. Garcia cites the need for mental health care for inmates.

It's appropriate, then, that Hochul pushed for mental health funding as part of New York's$229 billion 2023-24 state budget. Indeed, she cited it as a "moral imperative," which it surely is, especially in her hometown of Buffalo, which on Sunday will mark the one-year anniversary of a horrifying hate crime.

The budget will help, providing new inpatient hospital beds, expanding the number of community walk-in clinics, adding housing for people needing mental health services and, crucially, requiring health insurance companies to cover the costs of "critical mental health services."

Call it a down payment. Government has a lot of ground to make up, as do Americans generally. Only in recent years have we begun to find it easier even to broach the subject of mental health.

It will be important to evaluate what this spending accomplishes, especially as it regards a generation of children enduring stresses the rest of us never had to consider.

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