Not the last mental health post you'll read
There’s been a flood of posts and articles and emails about mental health this month, and this won’t be the last you read. It’s great to see the stigma fading. But let’s not trade old mistakes for new ones. Now’s the time to back up empathetic intention with actual investment and treat mental health as an equal to physical health. A real equal.
We know we’re in the middle of a mental health crisis. Behavioral health access for children and adolescents alone can take up to 13-15 weeks. It’s too long to wait when youth depression and suicide have risen by 60% over the past decade. As a former Massachusetts mental-health commissioner said: “It’s easier to get your kid into Harvard Medical School than find a psychiatric bed in a state hospital.”
The need is clear and growing - this week the surgeon general announced, in a 19 page report, that social media presents a “profound risk” to young people’s mental health. The solution for this is the same as for urgent physical ailments. We need to speed up access to high-quality care. This works whether you’re depressed or your diabetic.
Just having good mental health treatments, which we do, is not enough. They have to be continual, personal, and findable. Helpfully, we now know how to navigate people and deliver just this kind of healthcare experience. With a nationwide network of providers cross-trained in behavioral health, Included Health has taken a step we believe all care deliverers should. We’ve fully integrated primary care and behavioral health, treating them both equally. We’ve also integrated operations (call notes, intake details, visit charts) for smooth handoffs between physical and mental care.
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This is how you both destigmatize behavioral health treatment and simultaneously address physical well-being (the two are inextricable: 50% of those we’ve treated for behavioral health also had a chronic condition). We want all patients to be part of broad, ongoing work toward better health outcomes.
And I mean all. We offer care from everyone from coaches to psychiatrists. Over half our Included Health therapists and a third of our psychiatrists treat under 18 year olds, and they treat them well: 77% of members 12-18 show improvement in depression symptoms after 4 visits, and 81% show improvement in anxiety symptoms after 4 visits. We’ll continue to hone our approach, but results like this matter. Thank you to Ami Parekh , Nikole Benders-Hadi, M.D. , and our whole Behavioral Health team for designing a behavioral health model to treat people better.
So this Mental Health Awareness Month, and every month, across our industry and society we need to give mental and physical health equal billing. Accepting mental health is not enough. We need to monitor, promote, and maintain it - culturally and individually. We will know we’re doing that, and mental health has reached parity with physical health, when behavioral health is fully integrated with primary care and “a meditation a day” becomes as cliché as an apple.
VP of Healthcare Solutions @ OSP
1yGreat article! It's high time we start talking about mental health issues like depression and normalize seeking help openly as and when required. Thank you for spreading awareness about this, Owen Tripp.
Expert Operational Leader | Team Building, Profitability, Compliance, Viable People Soft Skills, Premier Service Delivery through Accountability and Process Optimization.
1yAwesome