The world has become a very complicated place. I suppose it always was, but today’s complexities are new and different and constantly changing with technology. It’s easy to think of ways our professional lives could be simpler and the treatment of our patients more attentive. Reflections, predictions, and all things “Happy New Year” tend to come as lists, and I don’t want to break with tradition. A list of my mental health hopes for 2016 follows:
1. I hope … that as our legislators rethink the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), they don’t throw out the baby with the bath water, and the gains that were made remain in place. Among the good that’s been done has been the ability to keep adult children on a family policy to age 26, the elimination of “preexisting conditions” as exclusions from health insurance coverage, and the overall expansion of who is able to get some form of health insurance.
Dr. Dinah Miller
2. I hope … psychiatric treatment comes to be about so much more than medications, and that psychiatry resumes the priority of listening to patients on so many different levels. People are about more than checklists of symptoms and side effects, and their problems occur within the context of their lives. This is often more than a psychiatrist can piece together when seeing four or five patients an hour. In addition, there has been the added burden of attending to screens, data collection that is irrelevant to treatment, and paperwork burdens. I’d like to see the end of “meaningful use,” irrelevant maintenance of certification exams, and demands to use electronic medical records that divert psychiatrist time and attention without improving patient care. Technology should facilitate excellent care, not detract from it. And in my continued hope for our Internet-based world, I’ll wish for efficiency and innovation in how we use technology to learn, to communicate with one another, and to offer care to our patients, without compromising patient privacy.
3. I hope … discussions about involuntary treatment come to be about reducing the suffering of our patients, and not about preventing mass murders. It’s an expectation psychiatry simply cannot meet.
4. I hope … our legislators will come to understand that “mental illness” does not cause gun violence, and that a better predictor of violent behavior is a past history of violence, substance abuse, anger, and impulse control problems, and not the presence of a particular diagnosis or the catchall category of mental illness.
5. I hope ... we stop political discussions calling for an end to stigma while simultaneously stigmatizing those with psychiatric disorders.
6. I hope … that insurers and pharmacy benefit managers are required to limit preauthorization requirements to the most expensive and controversial forms of care. They must be required to standardize, simplify, and streamline any preauthorization procedures, and to be held to a level of accountability for the care that is denied.
7. I hope … that Medicare and Medicaid become user friendly entities that are easy to navigate and welcoming to psychiatrists so that our patients with limited incomes have access to treatment.
8. I hope … we come to appreciate the need for “housing-first” options for people who live and sleep on our streets. In a civilized society, this is a disgrace, and it benefits no one. It shouldn’t matter whether people with nowhere else to sleep do so because they are mentally ill, addicted, or simply impoverished: We need to provide better housing options. It is the humane thing to do, and it is more cost effective than paying for the correctional and medical care that result from homelessness. For those who are homeless because of untreated mental illness, it is so much easier to take medications when they have a shelf to put the bottles on.
9. I hope … for an understanding that our world is not black and white: We don’t neatly divide into those who are mentally ill and those who are not any more than we neatly divide into those who are good guys and those who are bad guys. People are complex, and mentally healthy people can behave in very disordered ways given the wrong set of circumstances. And, quite obviously, we all have a bit of both the good guy and the bad guy in us, and to believe otherwise is to be naive.
10. I hope … for both mental health and all of medicine, that all our treatments become available to all of our patients. It doesn’t matter how wonderful new treatments are if they are available only to those patients who are wealthy enough to pay for their own care, or who have Cadillac insurance policies that will reimburse for a given therapy.