Sam, a 16-year-old Oregonian, pondered suicide and was unable to get intensive mental health services for months.
Sam’s mental health worsened, but residential providers turned them away. After bouncing in and out of emergency departments, Sam ended up in an out-of-state hospital’s psychiatric care wing. After four months there, Sam eventually found a residential facility in Oregon.
The personal account, contained in the Oregon Health Authority’s Ombuds Program report released Wednesday, offers a window into the struggle that families across Oregon face as they try to access outpatient or residential services for their children with behavioral health needs. The Ombuds Program advocates on behalf of Oregonians as they struggle to access services, usually Medicaid-funded treatment and programs through the Oregon Health Plan. The report’s release coincided with separate announcements Wednesday of plans for expanded residential treatment in the Portland area.
The Ombuds Program’s report looks at the needs of Oregon children, teens and young adults as they try to access behavioral health services and makes recommendations for how the state can better serve people in their communities. The Ombudsman Program, which operates independently from the Oregon Health Plan, has received 115 reports from Oregonians since 2019 about the lack of mental health services or poor quality of care related to those services for young people.
Like Sam, each case represents a human life: A grade-school child without access to mental health care. A child in the foster care system needing mental health care who was moved from a family to a hotel with child welfare staffers.
Thousands are in peril. From mid-2021 to mid-2023, 4,725 Oregon Health Plan members 25 and younger visited hospital emergency rooms and received a mental health diagnosis. On average, each visit lasted 14 hours, but some patients lingered there for days. Emergency rooms are not set up to treat mental health issues, and emergency care is among the most expensive but people end up there as a last resort.
Nearly half a million Oregon residents 18 or younger are enrolled in the Oregon Health Plan, and they represent about one-third of the 1.45 million Oregonians in the program that provides medical, dental and behavioral health services to low-income people.
GET HELP If you are struggling or
having suicidal thoughts,
help is available. Call or
text the 988 Suicide & Crisis
Lifeline or chat at 988lifeline.org.
Cate Drinan, senior ombudswoman with the office, said the report looks for ways to improve services in communities for children before they need intensive residential services.
“We decided to ask the question: What could or should exist in the communities that these youth and families live in that if it did exist there would prevent them from needing to rise to that level of crisis in the first place?” Drinan said in an interview. “So it really turned our focus away from residential care and toward community-based mental health for children and youth and families.”
If you are struggling or having suicidal thoughts, help is available. Call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or chat at 988lifeline.org.
Oregon Capital Chronicle
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