One in three mothers in Virginia struggle to find mental health care for their children.
That’s what Inseparable, a mental health advocacy group, and Count on Mothers, a national research firm, found in their 2025 national survey. The mothers surveyed said that time was the biggest hurdle to accessing care for their children’s mental health needs.
While Virginia isn’t unique — 23% of the 2,703 mothers surveyed nationally reported facing similar challenges — the findings highlight what many parents and mental health professionals already know: It can be difficult to find mental health support for a child in Virginia. There are long waitlists due to a shortage of professionals, long drives to reach them and financial barriers to care.
Virginians, and others across the U.S., are facing a youth mental health crisis that became pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic and hasn’t faded since, according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data.
“We do continue to be in a mental health crisis for youth,” said Rachel Deane, Chief Executive Officer at Voices for Virginia’s Children, a child policy and advocacy group.
There is an overall shortage of psychologists and psychiatrists in Virginia, but it becomes even more pronounced when families look for professionals qualified to work with adolescents. It’s hard to find a psychiatric hospital bed for an adult during an acute crisis — and even harder if the patient is a youth. And then there’s the question of insurance coverage, which is one of the main barriers to care nationwide, according to the Inseparable survey.
And the situation becomes even more challenging the farther one travels from urban centers, often leaving parents to drive long distances for what can be life-saving help.
A 2022 assessment of the mental health workforce by the Virginia Health Care Foundation found that 93 of Virginia’s 133 localities are federally-designated “Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas.”
“The small number of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists in Virginia is particularly concerning, especially with recent reports of the traumas high numbers of children are experiencing as a result of the pandemic,” the report said.
Charlottesville Tomorrow spoke with several mothers across Virginia about what it’s like to seek mental health care for their children. Here are the stories of four mothers — three of whom requested to use a pseudonym or share only their initials to protect the identities of their children.
Long drives for care take physical and emotional toll
Brenda’s 14-year-old daughter has been hospitalized in a psychiatric facility in Northern Virginia for more than a month now — three hours away from home in Nelson County. It’s not a long-term facility; beds there are typically limited to seven-day stays. But this hospital was the only one with a youth bed available — and it remains the only option, Brenda said.
“There’s nothing. It’s just awful,” she said.
Her daughter has been hospitalized three times since Brenda’s husband died by suicide this spring. He had severe depression, but doctors couldn’t seem to diagnose or treat him in time, Brenda said. His sudden death devastated the family and worsened her daughter’s existing mental health struggles, leading to rage and manic episodes, she said.
All three hospitalizations took place in different facilities — wherever UVA’s Emergency Department could find an open bed. On the third hospitalization, after a suicide attempt, her daughter was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
On Sept. 21, Brenda applied for Medicaid to cover her daughter’s transfer to a residential facility closer to home. It took Medicaid almost a month to approve the expense.
“We want it to be somewhere close. We’re holding our breaths that the place we want has an opening when the insurance clears at all.”
Once her daughter comes home and her medications are stabilized, Brenda hopes to take all three of her children to see a psychologist in Charlottesville — a 40-minute drive away. It’s the only provider she could find after months of searching.
“I do a lot of driving. My car is 2019 and I have 147,000 miles on it,” she said.
When C.B.’s teenage daughter needed a mental health professional last year, it was urgent — she had severe depression and suicidal thoughts. She was 13.
“She was in crisis mode, so we needed her seen right away,” C.B. said.
She took her to the UVA Emergency Department, a 50-minute drive one way from their home in Louisa County. The staff there didn’t think she was an immediate danger to herself and didn’t keep her for further observation, but recommended finding a psychologist who could see her as soon as possible. So C.B. started looking — quickly realizing how difficult it was to find someone who specialized in youth mental health.
She tried Region Ten, which has a presence in Louisa County, but there were no openings. Her daughter’s school has counselors, and a way to access online counselors for those who need it, but given the severity of the situation, C.B. wanted an in-person professional.
The only available provider C.B. could find was in Richmond — a 50-minute drive from her home. So, C.B. and her daughter made the trip once a week for months. Now her daughter is feeling better, and they only make the drive once a month, but it’s still three hours out of their day — and during school hours.
The experience was an eye-opener, C.B. said.
“It really drove home just how tough it can be for families in rural areas to get the help they need for their children. The distances are long, and it takes a lot of time and effort including school absences and work schedules. It’s clear that we need more resources and support for mental health care in our local communities.”
‘No one is accepting new patients right now’
Theresa’s 15-year-old son was struggling with behavioral issues and depression — enough to signal to both her and his teachers that he needed help.
She tried Region Ten and Blue Ridge Medical Center, the two local options in Nelson County, but neither had openings. Blue Ridge Medical Center suggested an online counselor, who was able to see her son right away.
Region Ten’s spokesperson Joanna Jennings, said in an email that this experience “is never the outcome we intend” and spoke about how the average wait time between first contact and an initial appointment in Louisa and Nelson counties is about two weeks. Youth with higher-acuity needs are typically referred to Region Ten’s Crisis Division at the Old Lynchburg Road campus.
“In many cases, youth who require higher levels of care must first be medically cleared in a hospital emergency department before admission to an appropriate facility, a process that can cause additional strain for both families and hospitals,” she wrote.
Theresa said that while her son could see his counselor online every week consistently, he did a lot better.
That didn’t last. The counselor began canceling sessions for various reasons, eventually giving Theresa a list of other providers who might be a better fit. But she had no luck getting her son in to see any of them.
“No one is accepting new patients right now,” she said.
Driving elsewhere for care isn’t realistic. Theresa works part-time and has to pick up her two sons from school and care for them during the afternoons and evenings. Seeing a provider would mean at least an hour’s drive each way — time she simply doesn’t have and gas expense she can’t consistently afford.
“For people who don’t make enough money or have paid time off, it’s hard. You can’t do it,” said Theresa.
Now, her youngest son — who is 10 — has gotten into fights and has displayed other behavioral issues that concerned the school counselor. Theresa knows he may need help, too, but she doesn’t see the point in trying, given how discouraging the search has been.
She also feels that she needs some mental health care for herself, but until local providers offer flexible scheduling for parents juggling multiple responsibilities, finding that time feels impossible.
Even those familiar with the youth mental health system find it difficult to navigate
Eva Colen is as advanced a navigator of the youth mental health system as one can be without working in the field. She works in local government in Richmond, coordinating with schools and counselors to bring more resources to kids.
Yet when her then 5-year-old son began showing behavioral problems and anxiety two years ago, she couldn’t find a provider for him. She called nearby clinics, searching for someone who specialized in children and play therapy. After one clinic saw him for a screening appointment to determine urgency and decided his case was not urgent, he was placed on a waitlist.
Months passed with no callback. Eventually, they discovered the cause of his behavior — a rare medical condition had caused hearing loss in one ear. He simply didn’t know how to react when he couldn’t hear what others were saying.
He underwent an urgent, invasive procedure to remove a noncancerous growth between his ear and brain before it became more serious.
That was when Colen finally got him in to see a counselor — she called back and used the right phrase: “medical trauma.” That label moved him to a different, faster queue, and he was seen shortly after surgery.
Between the surgery and therapy, he became a different child. He learned to advocate for himself and manage his emotions in ways many adults struggle to do.
But the experience left Colen wondering: what if she hadn’t known how to advocate for him? She knew providers, resources and how to describe his needs to get him help. And she had good insurance.
“Every step of the way it was still very hard,” she said. “It was still extremely challenging to access care for my son.”
There isn’t just one solution, experts say
The difficulty of accessing mental health care isn’t something that can be easily solved, because there’s no single solution, experts told Charlottesville Tomorrow.
“It is a very complex problem. A lot of kids are having mental health struggles, especially since the pandemic. And there was already a shortage before the pandemic, but now there’s so much more demand and so much more stress in kids’ lives,” said Deane, CEO of Voices for Virginia’s Children, an independent child-focused policy and advocacy organization.
“The result is a lot more need for those services.”
Addressing the shortage of mental health professionals isn’t straightforward, but there are multiple efforts underway in Virginia.
Harrison Hayes, the executive director of the Virginia Health Workforce Development Authority (VHWDA), which is charged with helping increase the number of health care professionals statewide, said the agency is bringing together a group of professionals and lawmakers involved in the behavioral health industry to try to understand and address behavioral health needs and shape policies that support those efforts.
In 2022, the VHWDA conducted a study on Virginia’s health workforce and found that, if existing trends continued, shortages across the health care system would worsen — including in behavioral health. Recruitment and retention in that field were being held back by high barriers to entry, high stress and low pay, the report noted — challenges the agency said needed to be addressed.
“We need to be very intentional about how we are training behavioral health providers and making sure that we’re educating young people about various paths that they can take into the behavioral health professions, and then also from kind of a state regulatory level, looking at ways that we can make it easier for individuals to practice in the behavioral health field with the degrees that they’re obtaining,” said Hayes.
Hayes said part of that progress is coming from recent legislative changes that could help strengthen the behavioral health workforce. In particular, two bills signed into law — Senate Bill 155 and House Bill 1499 — create new and more accessible pathways for people to enter the field, including new roles such as behavioral health technicians and behavioral health technician assistants.
“Our hope is that more community colleges will start to take on this program,” he said.
Other organizations and efforts are also focusing on making it easier for people entering the field to overcome financial barriers or the lack of residency opportunities available, which are required for professionals to finish their training, explained Deane.
For instance, Virginia Health Care Foundation (VHCF) has a program called Boost, which helps to pay licensed supervisors of mental health professionals in residence for the supervision hours required for the mentees to obtain licensing in Virginia. The program has already produced 159 practicing licensed therapists and now has 400 more enrolled, according to Rachel Rees, VHCF CEO.
There are also statewide efforts to help ease the shortage by adding more mental health providers and counselors in schools, often by contracting with outside professionals to see students, or by making telehealth options accessible in schools for people who can’t find local providers. In central Virginia, these efforts are being led by public school districts and individual counties, with some funding support from the state, past Charlottesville Tomorrow reporting showed.
Another approach to bridging the gap involves expanding the role of other medical professionals. The Virginia Mental Health Access Program, or VMAP, is a statewide initiative focused on training pediatricians, primary care providers and OB-GYNs to screen, diagnose and treat common mental health conditions that appear in both pediatric and perinatal care, said Rachel Reynolds, VMAP’s assistant director of operations.
If families need additional care and struggle to find it, VMAP helps them navigate the process.
“We find that this is really helping with some of these gaps in care, particularly in rural areas,” Reynolds said.
“The workforce shortage is probably not going to go away soon, and it’s not something that can be fixed quickly. So providing faster access to consultation and education reduces that struggle and the impact of the crisis,” she said.
Rees echoed the sentiment.
“This is a long-term investment. We’ve got to be coming at this from multiple approaches,” she said. “There’s no silver bullet that’s going to resolve the issues that we have, so it’s important that we have a variety of different ways that we’re trying to accelerate the number of licensed professionals, because we’re certainly in a place right now where demand exceeds capacity. And we can anticipate that it will until we get more folks licensed in the field.”
Meanwhile, parents are left to work with whatever care options they can — or can’t — find for their children.