Children's Mental Healthcare Results in Parents Having Debts and Being Isolated

Parents do all they can to care for their children's mental health struggles. However, along with these are more challenges to face as savings are depleted, debts increase, and parents feel how alone they are in their journey for their child's treatment and healing.

A recent KFF poll, designed to measure how people borrow to pay medical bills, revealed that a hundred million Americans have some healthcare debt, and 20 percent borrowed money for mental health services.

Untold numbers of families deal with countless challenges to find ways to pay for mental healthcare, resulting in debt. America has too few therapists and psychologists and fewer who accept insurance, which adds to the families' financial struggles.

To make sure that their children get the help they need, parents refinance their houses, drain their college savings, or borrow from family and relatives. However, this kind of borrowing isn't included in estimates of medical debt. As a result, it is difficult to know how much parents are shelling out of their pockets for their kids' mental health treatments.

Story of Rachel

Rachel and her husband have an adopted son named Marcus (not their true names to protect their identities). They adopted him when he was still 7-month-old from foster care in Guatemala and brought him home with them to Lansing, Michigan. With a round face framed by a full head of dark hair, Marcus was giggly and verbal - learning names of sea animals off flashcards, impressing other adults.

Everyone was so in love with him and his giggles. His wittiness impresses other adults. However, when it was time for Marcus to go to school in preschool, there was a sudden change. He kept resisting school, would throw himself on the ground, and pretend that he was sick until the refusals got more intense and hard to deal with.

That was the beginning of their family's journey to therapy. The parents initially did not take it as an issue as they have the funds for it. They have savings for retirement, college, and emergencies. However, they did not realize that it was going to be a very long journey that is still happening up to this day.

Marcus could not attend a regular school because it agitates him, triggering violence. Over the years, he has been on weekly therapy, hospitalization, and specialized schooling. Rachel needed to leave her job to take care of her son, leaving her husband as the family's sole earner.

Today, Marcus is already 15 with a younger sibling, and his parents have exhausted their savings and are, in fact, in debt as they continue to pay for his treatments for severe depression, anxiety and mood disorders. He is now in residential care out of state. It helped to normalize his behavior and mental health, yet it costs Rachel and her husband $12,500 a month.

"All of our savings is gone. How are we going to send our kids to school? How are we going to recover from this? I don't know. Those thoughts in your mind - there's no space for that when you are just trying to keep your child alive," Rachel said after divulging that they have just taken out a second mortgage and borrowed from their retirement accounts.

Lack of data keeps parents in isolation

Marcus' treatment costs reached a quarter-million dollars over the past two years alone. Unfortunately, nearly the entire amount was declined to be covered by their insurance company, Rachel said.

Marcus' violence heightened, and he became a danger to himself and others. The insurance agents repeatedly explained to Rachel that the recommended treatment programs and specialists could not be covered because they were "not medically necessary or would require reauthorization within days."

Meanwhile, Marcus' problems at home were getting more serious and dangerous to the point of Rachel having to look for hiding places so that her son would not find and attack her.

Thus, with this "do-or-die situation," the parents had no choice but to pay for the treatment themselves and fight it out with the insurance companies and lawyers later on.

Patrick Kennedy, a former member of Congress and founder of the mental health advocacy group Kennedy Forum, stated that no real data and problems of families like Rachel's are tracked, leaving people, especially parents, in the shadows.

He further said that the problems like this should not burden families that are too busy trying to survive. The lack of data cannot make insurers accountable for legal obligations to fund mental healthcare or discuss specific policy changes.