Emergency room doctors and pediatricians are pleading for help with a flood of children and teenagers showing up at emergency rooms due to mental health issues.

A surge of mental health emergencies among children has overwhelmed emergency rooms, according to a joint paper released Wednesday by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and Emergency Nurses Association (ENA).

The children showing up in crisis are often suffering from emergencies related to anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts or attempts, the groups said.

“The ER has become a de facto referral center for all of these problems, and there’s too many of them for the emergency department to manage,” said lead author Dr. Mohsen Saidinejad, who directs pediatric emergency medicine at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Saidinejad is also a member of the AAP and ACEP committees on pediatric emergency medicine.

“That is not who we are as ER physicians. We are not mental health professionals. We cannot provide definitive care,” Saidinejad said.

About half a million children with mental or behavioral health problems show up at emergency rooms each year, according to the joint paper. That number was already rising before the pandemic, but the pandemic exacerbated the crisis, the physician groups said.

One issue emergency rooms encounter is that pediatric mental health crises tend to be very complex and require much longer hospital stays. The average pediatric mental health stay is 17 hours compared to an average five hours for all emergency room stays, according to the paper.

The pediatric mental emergency visits also drain “resources that would have been needed to run the normal medical operations of the ER, so that increases of length of stay for the other patients as well,” Saidinejad said.

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Another issue is that children who arrive at emergency rooms in crisis are less likely to get the follow-up care they need if they only go to an emergency room rather than a psychiatric crisis center or community mental health center, according to Saidinejad.

The physician groups are calling for several measures to address the crisis.

One measure is community-based teams that could respond to children in crisis at school, in doctors’ offices, and even at their homes. Another measure is placing pediatric mental health professionals in emergency departments. Another aid the groups suggested is supporting emergency department staff with information about high-risk children, such as abuse victims and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The country’s mental health system needs to be expanded as well, the paper’s authors said.

There is only one mental health professional for every 124,000 children, and as many as 55% of all counties do not have even one psychiatric professional, Saidinejad said.

Telehealth for children’s mental health could also help in treating children before they land in the emergency room, the authors said.

“We in the ER are basically a safety net. We can’t say no to anything. We have to accept whatever comes our way. And I think that is why everybody is referring these children to the ER,” Saidinejad said.

The Biden administration is quietly selling parts intended for extending the wall along the southern border, according to a report from The New York Post. 

An online auction house called GovPlanet has sold over 80 steel parts originally intended for the border wall, making around $2 million since April. More lots will be auctioned off later this month as some critics say Biden is getting rid of the unused parts before House Republicans can pass a bill requiring they be used to extend the border wall, according to the Post.

Last month, the Democrat-controlled Senate passed its defense appropriations package that included a Republican-sponsored bill aimed at forcing the Biden administration to address the border crisis by extending the wall. Republican senators blasted the Biden administration for selling the parts for an extended border wall as illegal immigrants flood across the southern border. 

“The pennies made from selling the border wall will not be enough to pay the families who suffer from a criminal act committed by someone who crossed our open borders during the Biden administration,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-OK).

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who co-sponsored the bill known as the “Finish It Act,” told the Post that Biden’s move was “outrageous, behind-the-scenes maneuvering.”

“This sale is a wasteful and ludicrous decision by the Biden administration that only serves as further proof they have no shame,” Wicker said. 

The Post reported that the GovPlanet auction schedule picked up significantly in May after Wicker introduced the Finish It Act and increased again days after the Senate passed the defense package. House Republicans must pass a matching version of the bill before it becomes law. 

Republicans said that around $300 million in taxpayer-funded border wall parts have been abandoned since Biden became president. Money from the sale of the unused border wall parts reportedly goes back to the Pentagon. 

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In a report earlier this month, a GovPlanet source told The Daily Upside, “We are legally not allowed to mention these are the border wall materials, or we could lose our jobs. But that’s what they are – 110 percent.”

Since President Joe Biden took office, illegal immigrants have crossed into the U.S. in record numbers with estimates exceeding five million. According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there have been 1,973,092 southwest land border encounters so far in the fiscal year 2023, which began in October.