Rural Americans continue to struggle to find adequate mental health care. That’s despite the fact that the Affordable Care Act guaranteed that mental and behavioral health treatment would be covered by all health insurance policies sold on the federal health exchange.
However, as IVN reports, psychological coverage does little good if you live in an area where no services are available.
As Columbia University Psychologist Paul Appelbaum notes, “Tens of millions of people who did not have insurance coverage may now be prompted to seek mental health treatment. And the capacity just isn’t there to treat them.”
Health experts have been lamenting for years the fact that many people in rural areas are in desperate need of mental health care.
Rural Texas suffers the most from a lack of services. In Texas, 185 out of 254 counties have no psychiatrist. That means 3.2 million people in the Lone Star State don’t have access to mental-health care.
