ED's: "Wrong place for mental-health care"

From the Boston Globe:

Hospital emergency departments are among the least appropriate and most expensive places in Massachusetts for patients in psychiatric crisis. Yet these departments are where police, families, group homes, nursing homes, and others routinely take people who are agitated, panicked, or threatening to hurt themselves. Emergency departments are also where people go at the end of the month when their medications run out, when their primary physicians can't see them for two weeks, when they are frightened or desperate and have nowhere to turn after 5 p.m. and their therapist's answering machine tells them to go to the emergency room.