I will note that in a lot of places in the US, the role of medium term acute psychiatric care is taken by partial hospitalization programs, where patients go to a facility (usually a few conference rooms in an office building) during the workday for intensive therapy and medication management, but go home with family in the evenings. These programs are a lot cheaper than inpatient programs, and the standard workflow in my experience (with "good" insurance) at this point is 3-10 days inpatient, followed by 2-10 weeks in a PHP, and possibly some part time program after that. A lot of people skip the inpatient part if there's no acute danger.

I'm surprised the author makes no mention of those sorts of programs in the article. It makes it sound like the options were a luxury 8 week inpatient or nothing, when there's really a lot of stuff in between.