Recent Study Highlights The Overlapping Barriers to Equitable Access of Mental Health Resources in Rural Communities

SHRIYA GARG – Mental health has always been a prevalent problem among the U.S. population. However, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent recession, there has been a 25% increase in anxiety and depression rates across the United States. In addition, even though 1 in 5 US adults live with a mental health disorder, more than 50% of adults do not receive treatment. As a result of this increase in mental health concerns among the population, the demand for the appropriate mental health resources to combat these issues has greatly increased. However, due to the national shortage of mental health practitioners, addressing the increasing mental health concerns that the U.S. population is facing has become largely impossible with solely in-person resources. 

Especially during the pandemic and years thereafter, telehealth has been championed as the solution to overcoming these personnel barriers as well as pre-existing barriers to access such as problems with transportation that patients might be facing. However, at a second glance, this transition to telehealth might be impeding rural patients from accessing mental health resources due to the inability to access online portals to their healthcare providers.

It is a well-known fact that access to in-person mental health practitioners is disproportionately distributed within the United States, with urban areas having much more access to this personnel than their rural counterparts. In fact, over half of the federally designated health-professional shortage areas are located in rural regions. Naturally, one would think that to overcome these in-person barriers, the next option would be to move to telehealthcare. However, as it turns out the communities that already lack basic personnel, are the same communities that lack infrastructure to support this transition – such as device or broadband access. In fact, according to a recent Nature Mental Health Study, counties with a high percentage of households lacking broadband access were at far greater risk of having no providers for any mental health service. 

Thus, it is important to understand that telehealth is not the “end-all-be-all” approach to expanding mental healthcare access. Rather, this approach has further isolated communities without access to broadband or connectivity infrastructure from their mental health care personnel and resources. That is not to say that telehealth should no longer be used. In fact, on the contrary, telehealth usage should continue to be used and expanded with the caveat that the infrastructure to support this telehealth is also present. Telehealth is part of the solution to provide more equitable access to mental health care, but cannot be the entire solution.

On a national scale, more needs to be done to bridge this gap between rural communities and their mental health care including investing in more personnel within the rural areas, fostering collaborations between different local businesses to sponsor increased broadband/device infrastructure, and conducting conversations with healthcare providers about the importance of both in-person and virtual options.
Read more about this issue at The digital divide in Access to broadband internet and mental healthcare | Nature Mental Health

Copy Editor – Dione Geiling

Photography Source – https://kchs.org/mental-health-in-rural-communities/