Improving our Health: The Mental Health Conundrum – Part Two

Thanks for reading last week. You gave some great answers on what unsettles your mental well-being on a daily basis. They included sick family members, job woes, money worries and depressing news stories. This week, let’s talk about how mental health affects our physical well-being.

The Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council Foundation’s research discovered the two underlying conditions related to hospital readmissions are type 2 diabetes and mental health disorders. If a patient suffers from diabetes (often related to obesity) or depression, they will likely have greater difficulty in healing during other medical issues. Being mentally ill causes us to be physically weak and sick for longer periods of time.

In the new gun control plan, our federal government has proposed the expansion of treatment for mental health disorders. This should allow us to begin a national conversation on mental health. The consensus is that we are not doing enough to provide such treatment. Even our state’s conservative legislators have acknowledged a need for the expansion of government-funded services. Some policy makers have encouraged “federally qualified behavioral health centers.” This is a separate idea from the health centers presently treating physical ailments around the country. The proposal also suggests “Project AWARE,” a program to be implemented for thousands of young people in order to identify early signs of mental illness.

These ideas do not merge the treatment of mental with physical health. This is a necessary step. At the moment, there is not a direct correlation between poor mental and physical health. Labeling mental and physical health separately is dysfunctional, denying crucial integration while also stigmatizing mental health treatment.

For our society to truly have efficient healthcare, we must consider all aspects of illness in a coordinated manner, acknowledging that wellness is a “holistic” notion. This means providing mental health training to providers in ways that coincide with treatments of other ailments. For specialty mental health services, such as psychosis and schizophrenia, training will allow doctors to identify these issues in simple office encounters. Of course, this requires time and training for the physician, as well as appropriate reimbursement. Treatment of this type is shown to have better outcomes than medical prescriptions.

Like diabetes, poor mental health is a pandemic. Solving the Mental Health Conundrum involves an enhanced awareness of these issues in society and the coordination of care treating this illness as a routine health ailment. There are financial and cultural barriers involved in solving this Conundrum. Next week, part three of this blog will focus on what we can do to improve our mental health in spite of the barriers. We will look at what each of us can do when unraveling the Conundrum. Ultimately, this hard work must be done to minimize the loss of health and life in our society.