> Claim 18: "The psychiatry services were limited and could only serve patients who were 'not too severe,' which meant that many patients were being sent to the already overburdened emergency rooms for suicidal ideations, for self-harm, and for inpatient eating disorder treatment."
> An outpatient clinic does not provide emergency inpatient care. It is normal for patients whose symptoms are severe enough to require emergency treatment to be referred by such a clinic to an ER. The NYT found patients from the Center were referred to the ER. That the ERs were overburdened, and that better options weren't often available for youth in severe crisis, is a sad reality of the U.S. mental health system. It is not something that can reasonably be laid at the feet of an outpatient service for a vulnerable group of young people that everyone agrees is at a higher risk of suicide.
But what the New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/health/transgender-youth-...) actually said was:
> At the trainings, E.R. staff shared concerns about their own experiences with their young transgender patients, which Ms. Hamon later relayed to her team and university administrators.
> The E.R. staff, she wrote in an email, had been seeing more transgender adolescents experiencing mental health crises, "to the point where they said they at least have one TG patient per shift."
> They aren't sure why patients aren't required to continue in counseling if they are continuing hormones," Ms. Hamon added. And they were concerned that "no one is ever told no."
That is, the ER departments were getting an unexplained increase in presentations from the clinic's patients despite the treatments supposedly working well. Which really does bring into question the idea that affirmation-only treatment significantly improves mental health.