In May, a Capital & Main investigation examining Kaiser Permanente’s mental health care system revealed that many patients across California are unable to access treatment on par with Kaiser’s medical care — in some cases, patients are forced to wait a minimum of four to six weeks between therapy sessions, falling far below established clinical guidelines. Now, Capital & Main is covering the human cost of Kaiser Permanente’s broken mental health care system by telling the stories of patients who’ve been through it first hand. Welcome to the new series, Patient Stories.
Victor Gomez, a 53-year-old former respiratory therapist, has spent his life learning to cope with the symptoms of his mental health disorders. His diagnoses are varied, and include anxiety, depression, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The many symptoms of his layered conditions manifest in different ways, but for Victor, one of the most common was uncontrollable emotional outbursts. By 2016, he’d reached a breaking point: He needed help, or he would never get better.
“I could already envision that I would just end up alone, a bitter person,” Victor said. “I didn’t want to end up alone when I had so many people who actually wanted to be with me. So I had to learn to be different.”
Victor sought therapy through his employer-based health insurance, Kaiser Permanente. He’d been given medical care through Kaiser previously, with largely positive results.
“As far as everything else that they’ve done for me, they actually are pretty good,” Victor explained. “This was the only time that I really can’t stand what they did.”
Almost immediately, Victor began to notice problems with the treatment plan Kaiser offered. He preferred one-on-one therapy — and would later learn that large group settings are a trigger for him — but his care team continually referred him to group therapy sessions. He needed to be heard and understood by his therapist. Instead, he felt shuffled through a system more concerned with meeting metrics than addressing his deeper emotional disturbances.
“The mental health care is sorely lacking,” Victor said. “It’s based on numbers. It doesn’t even take into account if you did anything about it, just that you talked about it.”
“The lack of access for people in Kaiser to adequate and timely mental health treatment is a matter of long standing,” said Beth Capell, a legislative advocate for Health Access California, a health care consumer advocacy coalition. “Sad to say it doesn’t seem to be fixed yet.”
