This happened to us when we wanted to get my son help for some behavioral issues. Trying to find a counselor who specialized in helping children was a nightmare.

Our health insurer's website listed a few dozen, which was encouraging at first. But when I started calling them most were no longer in business, no longer accepted our health insurance (despite still being listed on the insurer's website), or didn't accept any new patients. And of the few who did have some availability, their evangelical Christianity beliefs were a fundamental part of their work - to the point where Jesus preaching was going to be a constant focus of the therapy.

We finally found someone (she was a devout Christian but it didn't interfere with her counseling strategies, so that's fine). But even she stopped accepting new patients soon after we signed up because she was so slammed with demand.

The state of mental healthcare in America is fucking atrocious. There are too few therapists in general, especially ones who help children. And as this article points out, health insurers deliberately make it so difficult for those counselors to use them that they refuse to work with with many insurance plans. And so many therapists are outside the pricing of families, even when they have insurance, and even with those therapists giving discounts.

A big part of this is the legacy that mental healthcare still isn't seen as a legitimate practice by many in the corporate world, despite their false marketing claims. Considering how frequently big insurers screw people out of claims for physical illnesses (cancer, etc.), you just know they will screw people with mental health challenges at least as much. Because to some of them - especially older boomers who are still lingering in senior management rules - it's all fud.

Another part of the problem (which relates to my previous point) is that mental healthcare isn't as quantifiable as most physical healthcare (because the brain and feelings are very complicated), so corners are cut and the industry is seen with suspicion and frustration by insurers who are focused on making as much money from their customers as possible.

The net result? A ton of people who are struggling through daily life with their own challenges, and exhausted family members and friends who are having to try to help them as best they can.

Until we massively overhaul the broken healthcare/insurance system here, shit like these ghost networks and the underlying causes and their other effects will continue to break our society.