That's interesting...I worked at a mental hospital for 3 years and we were never any busier during the holidays. Which made sense, since suicides peak in the Spring.
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Thanks for sharing your perspective. Nice to meet a fellow colleague from the mental health field too.
I think the differences though in our experiences with our holiday census may lie more in the different types of units we both worked.
'Mental hospitals' as such, are generally free-standing facilities with mental patients who are medically stable. Their criteria for admission screen out patients who are medically compromised since the mental hospitals are not set up to provide much more than basic medical services. Which very much limits the admissions right then and there.
Those patients were admitted to our unit instead.
Our unit was part of a regular hospital in a large urban city. Our patients frequently had severe medical problems, and we were set up to care for any type of problem or crisis. We had 24/7 physician coverage on site. Plus all our RN staff had critical care experience.
Because of our proficiency, we were a referral unit for many other mental hospitals and facilities. In short, we got the sickest of the sick. Like a flood too, those sickest of the sick rose dramatically in numbers during the holidays.
I believe those higher numbers may have been due not only to holiday triggers, but those patients' severe medical illnesses and conditions, which were often powerful risk factors for suicide, in and of themselves.
I'm sure I don't have to tell you about the pitiful state of mental health services. Over the years, insurance companies have drastically slashed their reimbursement and approval rates for mental health admissions. So much so that many psychiatric facilities are being forced to close their doors.
Several have closed in our city over the last ten years. We are one of very few left. That has created a patient overflow that has landed on our doorstep. Our hospital, committed to providing full service care, subsidizes the costs of many of our patients' care.
Therefore, our unit has continued to treat many more patients, homeless and others, that mental hospitals will not keep. Again, resulting in a higher census for us when other mental facilities are lower.
Not meaning to blow our own horn. Just wanted to give you a better understanding of why we were always full at the holidays, even though it was still a long way until Spring...
JMO
