Posted on July 23, 2010 - by David

12.5 % of ER Visits Related to Mental Illness or Drug Use

There should be no doubt that mental illness represents one of the greatest burdens on the American health care system.  A recent report published by HCUP (Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project) tells us that 12.5% of ER visits in 2007 (12 million out of 95 million) were related to mental illness or substance abuse. While in many cases these were secondary diagnoses, over 4.1 million visits had mental illness or substance abuse as a first-listed or principal diagnosis.  40% of the 12 million resulted in hospital admission, making ER visits for mental illness and substance abuse 2.5 times more likely to lead to hospitalization than visits for all other conditions.

Two years ago, HCUP published a report about hospital stays related to mental health for the year 2006. 3.4% of all hospital stays (1.35 million out of 39.45 million) had a principal diagnosis of mental illness, with mood disorders and schizophrenia accounting for the overwhelming majority. Also significant is the fact that admissions with a principal diagnosis of a mental health condition had an average length of stay of 8.2 days, considerably longer than the average of 4.6 days for all stays.

Of course these are just a few of the many figures floating in the sea of statistics on the topic, but they seemed worth noting.