RICHMOND, Va. - With reforms underway in Virginia for children's mental health services, lawmakers and advocates want to hear from people dealing with the issues every day. Voices For Virginia's Children is hosting a community conversation Thursday in Charlottesville.

Executive director Margaret Nimmo Crowe says there will be a brief panel discussion that will include lawmakers looking to rewrite state policy. But she says most of the time will be for frank and open talk, including folks who know about the issue first-hand.

"Providers of mental health services, families who have children who experience mental health disorders tell us what is working and what is not working," says Nimmo Crowe. "What services are you able to get easily and what types of treatment are still needed?"

Nimmo Crowe says for the last five years they've been working on a long-term effort to improve access and funding for crisis services. She says lawmakers could make major changes to the system over the next few legislative sessions.

"We want to make sure those changes are informed," she says. "That policy makers are really hearing from the people on the ground, who either need the services or are trying to provide them."

She says much of the focus has been on adult mental health but it's important not to ignore children's needs, even if the issue is hard to talk about.

"We know that half of all mental illness begins before the age of 14, so if we're leaving the children's system out of the solution, we're really missing a big part of it," Nimmo Crowe says.

State Sen. Creigh Deeds will be on the panel. A year ago Deeds was violently attacked by his son, who was suffering from a mental illness. Since then Deeds has led much of the effort to reform Virginia's mental health services for children. Nimmo Crowe says it was crucial he be there.

"For us it was very critical to have him be part of this, not only to share, but also to hear what people are saying, because he is heading up the four-year legislative study commission."

Thursday's event is free and open to the public. It'll be held at the Jefferson School City Center in Charlottesville. Some snacks will be served, starting at 6 p.m.


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In California, families shoulder most of the burden of dementia care, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Washington found patients in the Golden State require about $55,000 a year in care, but only about $10,000 of it is paid through private or government insurance.

Amy Lastuka, lead research scientist in the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, said the direct costs of doctor visits, prescriptions, home health aides and nursing homes are just the beginning.

"It's particularly important to look at those indirect costs," Lastuka explained. "Because people with dementia tend to need a lot of care, especially as they get into the later stages, they can need round-the-clock care."

Researchers calculated the indirect costs, how much you would have to pay to hire someone to cover all the hours family and friends put in. Data show Americans spend $53 billion a year on direct medical care for the country's 5.5 million dementia patients but the real cost is five times higher, at $277 billion.

Lastuka argued states should do more to support caregivers.

"I would say, invest in adult day centers, because that way you have a place where someone can go during the day and get some cognitive stimulation and get cared for," Lastuka recommended. "Then, if your child is taking care of you, they could still work."

The California Department of Aging's website lists programs designed to lighten the load and help pay family caregivers.

Meanwhile, the reconciliation bill currently under consideration in the U.S. Senate known as the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" could have profound effects on services helping older Americans age in place. The bill seeks to eliminate the federal Administration for Community Living, the agency overseeing regional Councils on Aging, which run programs like "Meals on Wheels."


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A farm crisis hotline in Nebraska has seen a sharp uptick in mental health-related calls from farmers, worried about losing access to loans and proposed cuts to SNAP funding.

They fear that it would reduce markets where they can sell locally grown products.

Nebraska Farmers' Union President John Hansen also oversees a rural response hotline, which he said has been flooded with calls from farmers in financial distress expressing serious mental health concerns.

"Every year, there's always somebody in agriculture who is facing very difficult situations, and there's a real need for the kinds of services that we provide," said Hansen, "which is everything from food assistance to bookkeeping assistance, financial management."

Hansen said the Nebraska Rural Response Council, which runs the hotline, helps pay for mental health services for farmers in need.

Hansen figured the crisis hotline would dwindle after it was established to handle calls during the 1980's farm crisis - but said the number of requests has only picked up, especially recently, and jumped from 4,500 calls a year to more than 7,000 now.

"We can tell from the severity of the calls and the number of calls that we are seeing," said Hansen, "for really the third year in a row, cashflows that just don't quite work."

The U.S. Senate just passed a resolution, co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer, R-NE, that declared May 29 Mental Health Awareness in Agriculture Day.

Farm advocates are also calling on Congress to increase funding for mental health resources for producers in the next Farm Bill, which is already 2.5 years behind schedule.

By Tony Leys for KFF Health News.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the KFF Health News-Public News Service Collaboration

This town’s hospital is a holdout on behalf of people going through mental health crises. The facility’s leaders have pledged not to shutter their inpatient psychiatric unit, as dozens of other U.S. hospitals have.

Keeping that promise could soon get tougher if Congress slashes Medicaid funding. The joint federal-state health program covers an unusually large share of mental health patients, and hospital industry leaders say spending cuts could accelerate a decades-long wave of psychiatric unit closures.

At least eight other Iowa hospitals have stopped offering inpatient mental health care since 2007, forcing people in crisis to seek help in distant facilities. Spencer Hospital is one of the smallest in Iowa still offering the service.

CEO Brenda Tiefenthaler said 40% of her hospital’s psychiatric inpatients are covered by Medicaid, compared with about 12% of all inpatients. An additional 10% of the hospital’s psychiatric inpatients are uninsured. National experts say such disparities are common.

Tiefenthaler vows to keep her nonprofit hospital’s 14-bed psychiatric unit open, even though it loses $2 million per year. That’s a significant loss for an organization with an overall annual budget of about $120 million. But the people who use the psychiatric unit need medical care, “just like people who have chest pains,” Tiefenthaler said.

Medicaid covers health care for about 72 million Americans with low incomes or disabilities. Tiefenthaler predicts that if some of them are kicked off the program and left without insurance coverage, more people would delay treatment for mental health problems until their lives spin out of control.

“Then they’re going to enter through the emergency room when they’re in a crisis,” she said. “That’s not really a solution to what we have going on in our country.”

Republican congressional leaders have vowed to protect Medicaid for people who need it, but they also have called for billions of dollars in cuts to areas of the federal budget that include the program.

The U.S. already faces a deep shortage of inpatient mental health services, many of which were reduced or eliminated by private hospitals and public institutions, said Jennifer Snow, director of government relations and policy for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. At the same time, the number of people experiencing mental problems has climbed.

“I don’t even want to think about how much worse it could get,” she said.

The American Hospital Association estimates nearly 100 U.S. hospitals have shuttered their inpatient mental health services in the past decade.

Such closures are often attributed to mental health services being more likely to lose money than many other types of health care. “I’m not blaming the hospitals,” Snow said. “They need to keep their doors open.”

Medicaid generally pays hospitals lower rates for services than they receive from private insurance or from Medicare, the federal program that mostly covers people 65 or older. And Medicaid recipients are particularly likely to need mental health care. More than a third of nonelderly Medicaid enrollees have some sort of mental illness, according to a report from KFF, a nonprofit health policy organization that includes KFF Health News. Iowa has the highest rate of mental illness among nonelderly Medicaid recipients, at 51%.

As of February, just 20 of Iowa’s 116 community hospitals had inpatient psychiatric units, according to a state registry. Iowa also has four freestanding mental hospitals, including two run by the state.

Iowa, with 3.2 million residents, has a total of about 760 inpatient mental health beds that are staffed to care for patients, the state reports. The Treatment Advocacy Center, a national group seeking improved mental health care, says the “absolute minimum” of such beds would translate to about 960 for Iowa’s population, and the optimal number would be about 1,920.

Most of Iowa’s psychiatric beds are in metro areas, and it can take several days for a slot to come open. In the meantime, patients routinely wait in emergency departments.

Sheriff’s deputies often are assigned to transport patients to available facilities when treatment is court-ordered.

“It’s not uncommon for us to drive five or six hours,” said Clay County Sheriff Chris Raveling, whose northwestern Iowa county includes Spencer, a city of 11,000 people.

He said Spencer Hospital’s mental health unit often is too full to accept new patients and, like many such facilities, it declines to take patients who are violent or charged with crimes.

The result is that people are held in jail on minor charges stemming from their mental illnesses or addictions, the sheriff said. “They really shouldn’t be in jail,” he said. “Did they commit a crime? Yes. But I don’t think they did it on purpose.”

Raveling said authorities in many cases decide to hold people in jail so they don’t hurt themselves or others while awaiting treatment. He has seen the problems worsen in his 25 years in law enforcement.

Most people with mental health issues can be treated as outpatients, but many of those services also depend heavily on Medicaid and could be vulnerable to budget cuts.

Jon Ulven, a psychologist who practices in Moorhead, Minnesota, and neighboring Fargo, North Dakota, said he’s particularly worried about patients who develop psychosis, which often begins in the teenage years or early adulthood. If they’re started right away on medication and therapy, “we can have a dramatic influence on that person for the rest of their life,” he said. But if treatment is delayed, their symptoms often become harder to reverse.

Ulven, who helps oversee mental health services in his region for the multistate Sanford Health system, said he’s also concerned about people with other mental health challenges, including depression. He noted a study published in 2022 that showed suicide rates rose faster in states that declined to expand their Medicaid programs than in states that agreed to expand their programs to cover more low-income adults. If Medicaid rolls are reduced again, he said, more people would be uninsured and fewer services would be available. That could lead to more suicides.

Nationally, Medicaid covered nearly 41% of psychiatric inpatients cared for in 2024 by a sample of 680 hospitals, according to an analysis done for KFF Health News by the financial consulting company Strata. In contrast, just 13% of inpatients in those hospitals’ cancer programs and 9% of inpatients in their cardiac programs were covered by Medicaid.

If Medicaid participants have mental crises after losing their coverage, hospitals or clinics would have to treat many of them for little or no payment. “These are not wealthy people. They don’t have a lot of assets,” said Steve Wasson, Strata’s chief data and intelligence officer. Even though Medicaid pays hospitals relatively low rates, he said, “it’s better than nothing.”

Birthing units, which also have been plagued by closures, face similar challenges. In the Strata sample, 37% of those units’ patients were on Medicaid in 2024.

Spencer Hospital, which has a total of 63 inpatient beds, has maintained both its birthing unit and its psychiatric unit, and its leaders plan to keep them open. Amid a critical shortage of mental health professionals, it employs two psychiatric nurse practitioners and two psychiatrists, including one providing care via video from North Carolina.

Local resident David Jacobsen appreciates the hospital’s efforts to preserve services. His son Alex was assisted by the facility’s mental health professionals during years of struggles before he died by suicide in 2020.

David Jacobsen knows how reliant such services are on Medicaid, and he worries that more hospitals will curtail mental health offerings if national leaders cut the program. “They’re hurting the people who need help the most,” he said.

People on Medicaid aren’t the only ones affected when hospitals reduce services or close treatment units. Everyone in the community loses access to care.

Alex Jacobsen’s family saw how common the need is. “If we can learn anything from my Alex,” one of his sisters wrote in his obituary, “it’s that mental illness is real, it doesn’t discriminate, and it takes some of the best people down in its ugly swirling drain.”


Tony Leys wrote this story for KFF Health News.


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