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Emergency Care: #7 Emerging Adults with Mental Illness
Proem
In this series we’ve met Emeka and Annie, two emerging adults with mental illness and Emeka’s mom, Erika. We learned about their ‘something’s wrong’ experience, finding treatment, family dynamics, and recovery. We met Matt, a high school teacher leading a student-run welcoming Ambassador program, and Dr. Bonnie, a primary care doc, managing the care of emerging adults with developing and full-blown illness with limited resources. You can see that I’m starting in the center with lived experience and spiraling out.
Welcome to today’s episode, #7 in the series, of the lived experience of another professional, Dr Joel Hudgins, pediatric emergency physician at Boston Children’s Hospital. Full disclosure, I worked from 2002 to 2008 at Boston Children’s leading their patient family experience initiative and I worked as a nurse/paramedic at two rural hospitals in West Virginia in the late eighties, early nineties. Despite my experience in pediatrics and emergency services, I feel out-of-touch with the dynamics of treating an increasing proportion of youth with mental illness while also faced with exploding infectious disease incidence, COVID, RSV, and flu…
