Our mental health crisis can’t be forgotten during pandemics

In the late spring of 2010, the upper Gulf Coast of the U.S. was hit with an unexpected environmental calamity in the form of the massive and weeks-long Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The pristine, powder sugar sand beaches on Alabama’s coast were ruined and the summer tourist season largely lost. Suddenly and without warning businesses greatly downsized or shuttered resulting in enormous job losses. The environmental and economic damage was awful, but there was another result which no one foresaw. We experienced an uptick in mental health issues, including drug abuse and suicide attempts.

In March of this year, as the U.S. began to shut down, I warned colleagues in Washington about what was coming. It was like the oil spill all over again, sudden and unexpected economic devastation and massive job losses – but this time all over the nation. You can’t take someone’s business or job and not expect an emotional response. Add to that the forced solitude and deprivation of social interaction, and a massive mental health crisis is inevitable. The effect on young people, still developing their minds and emotions, of a sudden end to their school year and a prohibition on seeing their friends offered its own, unique mental health threat.

In April, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 56 percent of U.S. adults reported that worry and stress due to the pandemic had affected their mental health. The National Helpline, a free service of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, received 20,000 texts in April and a 1000 percent increase in calls over the same time the year before. The Well Being Trust estimated we would see an additional 75,000 “deaths of despair” from alcohol and drug abuse and suicide. Dr. Mike DeBoisblanc, head of the trauma department at a medical center in San Francisco, said they witnessed a year’s worth of suicide attempts in just four weeks. The Overdose Mapping Application Program reported a 16 percent rise in suspected overdoses.

This comes as the U.S. was already experiencing a mental health crisis before the shutdown. The National Alliance in Mental Illness reported 1 in 5 U.S. adults and 1 in 6 young people experienced mental illness. From 1999 to 2018 suicides increased 35 percent.

Where was the public health community, so ever-present to talk about COVID in the national press, on the mental health damage we should have known was coming? As a member of Congress, I have been briefed by them dozens of times in the last four months with little mention of this mental health tragedy.

Mental illness is what it says, an illness. It’s as much of a health issue as cancer or, yes, COVID. We can’t shuttle it to the back burner while we make COVID response decisions that clearly have worsened mental health issues.

We are all learning lessons from the COVID pandemic and the crisis created in our responses to it. I hope we learn at least two lessons regarding mental health.

First, let’s pause before we make large scale decisions which suddenly and dramatically affect our society, and think about the effects across the board. Obviously, there was a great effect on the economy. And we lost spring semester in our schools, which is particularly damaging to poor children. So many people lost access to needed non-COVID health care for weeks. And, we took a worsening mental health situation in the U.S. and made it far worse.

Second, we need to move mental health up as a health care concern in this country. I’m no health care expert, but due to our Deepwater Horizon experience in 2010, I kept expecting some expert to speak up. If they did, they must have been missed by the national press. And, we public officials at the national level weren’t apprised of the mental health threat from a shutdown. No one said we needed to prepare for increased mental illness, overdoses and suicides.

I don’t make light of COVID. It’s killed over 150 of the people I represent, including two friends of mine. My sister-in-law is an ICU nurse, and I know there are tragic scenes in those units. I have colleagues in the House who have had it and thankfully survived. We need to take the disease very seriously.

But, we all now know the costs of shutting down our country. One of them is an alarming increase in mental illness. Let’s stop and think about those Americans who will suffer from that disease as we make decisions going forward.

Byrne represents the 1st District of Alabama.