May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I want to highlight a group that often gets overlooked: residents of nursing homes. It’s just as important to prioritize the mental health of our friends and loved ones as much as we prioritize their physical safety and health.

Transitioning to a nursing home can be a significant adjustment for everyone involved, particularly for the loved one or friend moving in. Many people may experience feelings of depression or anxiety after moving in. This can happen for various reasons, such as leaving their home, having to adjust to a new environment, mourning the loss of a loved one, feeling isolated from family and friends, losing their independence, disrupting their daily routines, coping with chronic illness, and lacking meaningful social interaction and activities.

The situation can be even more challenging for those entering the nursing home with pre-existing serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, severe anxiety disorder-including PTSD, and borderline personality disorder. Your loved one or friend may face the same struggles with depression and anxiety as everyone else, but they also have to deal with the symptoms of their mental illness, which may worsen due to the move.

Additionally, according to the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services, if your loved one is on Medicare or Medicaid and takes psychotropic medication, their medication will be gradually reduced unless clinically contraindicated within the first year to see if it can be reduced or discontinued, and then once a year (F758 in Appendix PP of the State Operations Manual 2023).

This is stressful to everyone involved, for it can take up to 6 weeks before it is at a therapeutic level again.

One must realize that staffing levels in nursing homes cannot adequately support every psycho-social need of each individual resident. Healthy interaction with family and friends is essential to the mental health of those in care facilities.

There is no need for the silent suffering of those living with mental illness in nursing homes.

We can do better. We must do better.