REVEALED: The state where you’ll be waiting two months for therapy – even if it’s just over Zoom, according to study

Some Americans are waiting up to two and a half months for essential mental health care — including appointments via video calling, a new study shows.

Access varies greatly by state, with wait times ranging from as little as five days to as much as three months.

In Maine, patients with conditions such as depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder wait up to 10 weeks for an initial appointment.

Meanwhile, the majority of people in North Carolina wait just four days before speaking to a professional.

Even more worrying, one in five services researchers contacted were inaccessible, meaning patients would struggle to even ask for help.

Policy analysts at the Rand Corporation think tank surveyed nearly 2,000 mental health clinics in the U.S. between December 2022 and March 2023 to determine how long someone in each state would typically have to wait for virtual or phone appointments.

Southern states had the shortest average wait times for virtual mental health services, taking less than two weeks to get an appointment.

Coastal states, meanwhile, generally had longer wait times, with people in New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maine waiting six weeks or more.

The researchers behind the report said higher wait times in certain states may be related to shortages of qualified mental health providers, telehealth policies and varied access to high-speed broadband internet.

Telehealth has become an integral part of the healthcare landscape in recent years, thanks to the global pandemic, which forced millions of people to turn to online platforms for doctor visits.

Spending on telehealth services increased dramatically between 2019 and 2020, from $306 million to nearly $3.7 billion.

Jonathan Cantor, lead author of the study and policy researcher at think tank RAND, said: We sought to replicate the experience of a typical client seeking specialty care at a mental health treatment center in the US.

‘The fact that we were unable to reach anyone at one in five facilities suggests that many people may have difficulty reaching a clinic for mental health information.’

It comes as the mental health crisis in the US worsens.

Depression and anxiety among young people have doubled as the COVID-19 pandemic has raged on, and the overall suicide rate has risen by about 30 percent since 2000.

About one-third of adults in the United States currently experience symptoms of depression or anxiety, which represents a threefold increase compared to the 2019 prevalence.

North Carolina had the shortest wait time for a teledoc appointment: just four days. However, Maine had the longest wait time: 75 days.

Most states in the South had an average wait time of two weeks or less. Florida and Georgia were the two exceptions with an average wait time of more than two to three weeks, while data for Louisiana and South Carolina were not available.

Residents of Missouri, New York and West Virginia will have to wait three to four weeks. Residents of Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Oregon and Connecticut will have to wait four to six weeks.

And in addition to Maine, residents of New Jersey and Massachusetts have to wait more than six weeks for a teledoc appointment.

Fewer than five clinics were surveyed in several Midwestern states, so no data was provided.

Rural areas have seen a proliferation of telehealth services to address the lack of providers, as most new practitioners head straight out of school to urban centers where wages are likely to be better.

Telehealth eliminates the need for patients to travel and provides a more accessible way to communicate with their healthcare providers in a timely manner.

Southern states also have lower population densities than their neighbors north of the Mason-Dixon line, which translates into fewer people overall seeking mental health care through telehealth.

Additionally, private institutions were nearly twice as likely to offer telehealth services as those that receive government funding to serve people enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid.

Dr. Cantor said, “Understanding the availability of telehealth is important for informing policies that maximize the potential benefits of telehealth for mental health care.”