Bedless Adolescent Psychiatry: The Ethical Challenge to End Psychiatric Boarding

Although often discussed as a logistical or operational problem, psychiatric boarding is more fundamentally evidence of the ethical failure of our society to build and maintain a comprehensive continuum of mental health care for all ages. It illustrates the failure of policymakers and health-care business leaders to honor a basic postulate of medical ethics in a just society, that individuals with a serious mental illness, like those with any other serious medical condition, deserve timely, appropriate, and effective treatment in a therapeutic setting.