Earlier this year Crystal Gonzalez, 25, started hearing voices. “I forgot that this is reality,” says Gonzalez, who lives with her mum and sister in the South Bronx, in New York City. Gonzalez has been diagnosed as bipolar, and as having a borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Since the age of 14, her trips to the psychiatric ward had been routine.
She is not alone, mental distress is related to one in every eight emergency department cases in the US. This translates into nearly 12m visits every year, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, an independent thinktank. Spending on these patients was $38.5bn (£24.9bn) in 2014, double what it was in 2003.
[For more of this story, written by Joe Sykes, go to http://www.theguardian.com/soc...sychosis-new-york-uk]
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