Welcome to Inpatient Psychiatry Today, a new website produced by Carlat Publishing. Our mission is to be your single comprehensive source of clinical and administrative information on all things related to inpatient psychiatry.
Why do we need such a website now? Because our system of inpatient mental health care is in crisis, and we need to get serious about fixing it.
In 1955, there were about 550,000 state hospital beds, and now there are less than 50,000. The number of private hospitals also decreased significantly in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, the population of people with serious mental illness has steadily increased. Many are now receiving very little treatment, and are often homeless—or in prison. In fact, the three largest inpatient “psychiatric units” in the US are the three largest prisons: Rikers Island in New York, Cook County jail in Chicago and LA county jail in Los Angeles. LA county jail is the largest mental institution in the US: of its 16000 inmates, approximately 20-30% have serious mental illness, a patient “census” of over 4000.
Thankfully, over the past several years, states are beginning to pick up the slack. In my home state of Massachusetts, several new hospitals have opened since 2010, with the addition of at least 700 beds, bringing the total number of psychiatric beds to 3000.
Similar trends are happening around the country, with many states rushing to open new state or private hospitals to meet the demand. What does this mean for you as a clinician? If you are already work in the inpatient world, you have more opportunities and are probably getting busier. And if you’ve considered doing this work, now is a great time to get into it, since many of these facilities are state of the art, with excellent design elements, cutting edge technology, and idealistic staff. There is a sense of mission out there, and inpatient psychiatry has become fun again.
I hope you will join Carlat Publishing as we launch our new inpatient resource, and we are always looking for contributors who want to help make our new venture a success—for clinicians, and indirectly, for our neediest patients.
Published on 4/13/2020. Copyright 2020 Inpatient Psychiatry Today.