A Kaiser mental health worker with the National Union of Healthcare Workers looks through a pile of signs Monday during day one of a week-long demonstration outside of a Kaiser Permanente hospital in San Francisco. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

A Kaiser mental health worker with the National Union of Healthcare Workers looks through a pile of signs Monday during day one of a week-long demonstration outside of a Kaiser Permanente hospital in San Francisco.

This past week, more than 2,000 mental health workers for the HMO health care giant Kaiser Permanente in California went on strike.

The strike was organized by the National Union of Healthcare Workers. The union says Kaiser Permanente patients have been the victims of "chronic failure to provide its members with timely, quality mental health care."

On Thursday, about 150 Kaiser Permanente employees picketed the Woodland Hills Medical Center in the San Fernando Valley. One of them was therapist Deborah Silverman. In her eyes, the biggest problem at Kaiser right now is understaffing.

Silverman says there are so many patients waiting to see therapists, that Kaiser sends new patients to see her, even if she's already overbooked. She says for three days over a two-week period she had four people she didn't know.

"I have to put them some place, and I didn't have any appointments for at least three weeks. So that's a huge emotional cost to me," Silverman says. "I either have to try to find someone else who has an open slot, which means the person has to switch, or people have to wait, and they've come to see you. It makes you feel it really bumps up against our ethical standards."

Silverman says switching therapists often makes it difficult to establish a bond and make progress.

John Nelson, Kaiser Permanent's vice president of government relations, says the company delivers some of the highest-quality mental health care in California and in the country. But, he says, they absolutely want to get better.

"Really the only way we can do that is by working together," Nelson says. "So we need our therapists and psychologists and others to be working with us, and constructively on how to get better, and not walking away from patients and being gone for seven days."

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Calif. Strike Highlights Larger Issues With Mental Health System