Across the country, the recession has cut state revenues at the same time the COVID-19 pandemic has increased costs, forcing state lawmakers into painful decisions about how to balance their budgets. Health care is one of the targets even in the midst of a health care crisis.
Experts say a bit of extra drinking isn’t a problem for many people, but they recommend watching out for specific behaviors that signal addiction.
In communities of color, the decision to participate in this moment of collective trauma — whether by watching and sharing the video of George Floyd’s death, discussing racial injustice on social media, or protesting and speaking out in the 3D world — can be one rife with anxiety and profound mental distress.
Counting deaths caused by the coronavirus pandemic is easier said than done. Without widespread testing, officials must sort through presumed COVID deaths and those who died with infections rather than from them. Then there are the indirect deaths of people who died from circumstances created by the pandemic.
During the coronavirus pandemic, people with obsessive-compulsive disorder and other serious anxieties may struggle to distinguish concerns brought on by their conditions from the fears shared by the general public. But some patients say successful treatment has armed them to handle COVID-19’s uncertainties.
In areas hit hard by the coronavirus, such as Detroit, behavioral health care workers have been overburdened and forced to scale back services at the same time people battling mental health disorders became more stressed and anxious.
Of those who went without seeing a doctor or other medical provider, 11% experienced a worsened medical condition, according to the poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation. In addition, nearly 40% said stress related to the coronavirus crisis has negatively impacted their mental health.
The pandemic has forced millions of families to weigh the risks of vulnerable grandparents getting too close to their beloved grandchildren — against the heartache of staying away.
At the start of the spring planting season, farmers across the U.S. heartland were already trying to recover from last year’s flooding amid worsening economic conditions when the pandemic struck. Farm bankruptcies and suicides continue to climb. A lack of mental health resources in rural America makes finding help more complicated.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has asked lawmakers to pare down their legislative wish lists and focus on the state’s coronavirus response. But state Sen. Jim Beall plans to forge ahead with his mental health care proposals, including a measure to create a state mental health parity requirement.
