“You can’t put a date on your depression,” she said.
It’s a problem shared by millions of mental health patients across the country. In Minnesota alone, nearly 168,000 adults live with a serious mental illness and one in four experiences a mental illness of some kind in a given year. Acute shortages of mental health professionals fuel growing delays for appointments.
But now, Thompson finally has a way to get help. Fast.
Instead of waiting weeks for her next scheduled appointment, she can stop in at a moment’s notice to see her psychiatrist at the Hennepin County Mental Health Center.
The center is on the cutting edge of a movement to deliver mental health care quickly and conveniently — mirroring the minute-clinic model for flu and colds.
Hennepin County officials say its drop-in program at the center, located on the outskirts of downtown Minneapolis, is the only one of its kind in the Twin Cities. For now, it only sees patients already connected to a doctor there — the service is not open to walk-ins off the street. Nationally, clinics are experimenting with other quick delivery methods, from mobile apps to iPad kiosks. A grocery store in Philadelphia recently began offering online screenings for mental health to its customers.
“There’s a shortage of psychiatrists and prescribing nurses all over the place,” said Sally Kratz, manager for the county’s Mental Health Center.
Almost 91 million adults live in areas where a small number of mental-health professionals makes finding treatment difficult, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Nationwide, the problem is getting worse as more psychiatrists retire without enough graduates in the pipeline. During a recent five-year span, as the U.S. population grew nearly 5 percent, the number of psychiatrists hardly budged, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. So experiments with delivering care in new ways are sprouting.
“The wave of the future is really more along the lines of having integrated care where a provider or group of providers can really treat the whole body at the same time and know how things will interact,” said Alyson Ferguson of the Scattergood Foundation, which funded the Philadelphia kiosks.
Hennepin’s program recently was honored as a “model practice” by the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
