Source: Health Policy Institute of Ohio
“The bottom line is, our treatments really work,” he said. “But people have to be able to access care. When they can’t, they’re left with fewer choices.”
Paul Nestadt, MD, an assistant professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins who has researched the epidemiology of suicide but was not involved in the study, said the new data points, once again, to the scarcity of psychiatric beds or mental health professionals who take insurance, factors that have prevented medical science from bringing down the country’s suicide rates.
The Affordable Care Act, which took effect fully in 2014, required all health plans to cover mental health and substance abuse services, and also sharply reduced the number of uninsured people in the U.S. Still, many respondents to the survey in the new report said the cost of mental health care was prohibitive; others said they were uncertain where to go for treatment or had no transportation.
The study, published recently in JAMA Psychiatry, traces a rise in the incidence of suicide attempts, defined as “self-reported attempts to kill one’s self in the last 12 months,” from 2008 to 2019. During that period, the incidence rose to 564 in every 100,000 adults from 481. Among the major findings was that there was no significant change in the use of mental health services by people who had tried suicide, despite the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and receding stigma around mental health care.
A new study has found that although suicide attempts in the United States have increased substantially over the last decade, the number of people who had recently attempted suicide and said they were not receiving mental health services has remained constant at about 40% (source: “Survey of Americans Who Attempted Suicide Finds Many Aren’t Getting Care,” New York Times, January 19, 2022).