There&039;s a New Number to Call for Mental-Health Crises: 988
among adults in the U.S. were four times higher between April 2020 and August 2021 than they were in 2019; every 11 minutes, an American died by suicide in 2020. Rates of depression and anxiety are rising especially quickly among teens. Mental-health professionals are struggling to keep up with the wave of demand.
The American Rescue Plan of 2021, which was passed to offer emergency funding to address the COVID-19 pandemic, provided $105 million in additional funding for mental-health resources to make the transition to 988 possible. While states reported in spring 2021 that their collective pot for supporting call centers was around $30 million, in the past year, legislatures have committed additional funds and have now allocated $200 million for implementing 988.
In June 2021, New York City began testing an experimental program that sends an unarmed mobile team consisting of a social worker, peer counselor, and EMT to address mental-health calls in Harlem and the Bronx. The team has responded to more than 2,400 calls so far, and produced encouraging. When 911 responded to mental-health calls from January to March 2022, 87% of people involved were dropped off at hospital emergency rooms.
988’s rollout includes provisions to help guard against that happening. SAMHSA and Vibrant have provided states with minimum quality standards, such as answering 90% of calls in the first 30 seconds and answering 90% of them locally, without having to rely on the national backup centers. Yet in aconducted by RAND Health Care in June, only 16% of state and local mental-health program directors said they had received adequate funding to support their states’ 988 plans.
Reimbursement for such services is also a major issue. Currently, not all insurers cover mental-health crisis services. The hope is that once people start calling 988, legislators will be aware of how much their states are subsidizing and start demanding more parity in coverage from commercial insurers, says Kevin Ann Huckshorn, a registered nurse with RI International, a nonprofit that operates a network of mental-health facilities across the country.
The mobile teams also provide relief for local law enforcement, who traditionally are responsible for obtaining clearance to admit people to psychiatric facilities. “The officer was left as the street-corner psychiatrist,” says Kevin Hall of the Tucson police department. Officers would have to determine if the person was a danger to themselves or others, and if so, call a psychiatrist to get authorization to bring them to a psychiatric hospital.
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