From The Magazine: By escalating a situation that’s been decades in the making, the pandemic has the potential to finally spark real change in how we think about and deal with children’s mental health.
, has boiled down his 40 years of child behavioral research and clinical experience into a guide for parents on his website. It includes what to do if you suspect your child might need expert help, tips on how to find high-quality care, and an essential list of questions to ask any provider you’re considering entrusting with your child’s mental health.
Covid wasn’t the only stressor of the past few years. The majority of Sadler’s teenage patients are Black, and in the summer of 2020, with racial justice protesters being kettled and gassed in the nation’s capital, they and their parents worried about their safety. “It addedfor a lot of families,” Sadler recalled. “Being out with friends, going to grab ice cream, just being out in the community — that is absolutely necessary just for their own mental health,” she said.
Banks has been shouldering that heavy lift for many years. She attended medical school at Howard University, then completed her training as chief resident in the child and adolescent psychiatry clinic at majority-White Georgetown University Hospital. All of that means that mental health care for children — a lifesaving essential service in many cases — is as out of reach for most families as a luxury vacation. To make it accessible to their patients, Banks and Adade basically have to pay — in lost income. The payments they receive from both public and private insurers are just one-half to one-third of what their local colleagues earn in out-of-network practices.
For Banks to potentially have to work three jobs to afford to practice accessible, patient-centric medicine is mind-boggling — the physician equivalent of underpaid teachers in underfunded schools using their paychecks to buy classroom supplies. We tend to love stories of one-person bootstrapping in this country . But they don’t add up to a scalable model for change.
That dollars-and-cents reality plays an enormous role not only in who gets care, but in who can afford to provide it, and how. Mental health parity laws adopted over the past 26 years were supposed to directly address this issue. But the insurance industry has been almostat skirting those laws; as one of the largest contributors to PACs, political parties and candidates, they’re not likely to face real pressure to change anytime soon.
Jensen’s hope, from the start, was that REACH’s trainees would go on to train others who might, he hoped, become trainers themselves. That model was on display one weekend in early January, when I tagged along to observe a group training of about 50 pediatricians from the greater Atlanta area. The doctors, nearly all women, were mostly young and very serious. They paid rapt attention throughout three long days. The stakes were very high.
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