Tag: Mental Illness

Succeeding in Fighting the Loneliness Epidemic

Jul 30, 2024

By JOSHUA SEIDMAN

In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy boldly declared that our country has a “loneliness epidemic.” In the Surgeon General’s public health advisory, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” he draws on decades of empirical evidence demonstrating the tremendous toll that loneliness has on people’s quality of life, and how it also increases the risk of premature death by 26%.

The question is: What can be done to tackle this intractable public health crisis? Perhaps even more pointedly, what is anybody actually doing that successfully reduces loneliness?

Steps Required to Reduce Loneliness

The first thing we have to do, as the Surgeon General said in his report, is “consistently and regularly track social connection using validated metrics.” Without ongoing measurement, we can’t even assess the problem, understand whether it’s getting better or worse, and know what interventions might be helping.

Furthermore, we need to tie those measurements to some sort of payment model. In order to focus providers and other stakeholders on the importance of loneliness, we need to hold them accountable for outcomes. Since we know that loneliness dramatically impacts both the quality and length of people’s lives, we should raise it as a priority for providers by tying some portion of their payment to their success in reducing loneliness.

We need to orient the health care system toward addressing factors that substantially affect the health of the population. Since the powers that be in the health care world accept smoking cessation as a valid performance measure, then it absolutely makes sense for payers and purchasers to hold providers accountable for addressing loneliness, a condition that the Surgeon General’s research equates to smoking 15 cigarettes per day.

Case Study of Success in Tackling Loneliness

Just as with any other proposed performance measure used to hold providers accountable, it’s fair to demand evidence that providers can actually influence outcomes for their patients. New research from Fountain House does just that —making clear that, with the right interventions, it is absolutely possible to measure and dramatically reduce loneliness in a way that meaningfully improves lives.

Fountain House pioneered the clubhouse model, a psychosocial rehabilitation model that supports people with serious mental illness (SMI). By addressing social drivers of health, we not only facilitate recovery, but we also reduce Medicaid costs by 21% relative to a comparable high-risk SMI population. An economic model we built also found that clubhouses reduce overall costs to society by more than $11,000 per person annually (when factoring in costs for mental and physical health, disability, criminal justice, and productivity/lost wages).

More to the point here, our population (and people with SMI generally) faces tremendous economic and social isolation and therefore are 2 to 3 times more likely than the general population to be lonely. Furthermore, research demonstrates that loneliness can be more intractable in the SMI population and failure to address it compromises their recovery and raises risk for an array of acute health events.

An Unfunded Mandate For Behavioral Health

May 13, 2014

By EDMUND BILLINGS, MD

Why politics, parity and performance requirements mean behavioral health hospitals should adopt now.

Imagine you go to work one day and your boss says all employees will be evaluated based on the performance of a new set of job skills that require additional training and, perhaps, new computer hardware and software. The boss also announces that some employees will be reimbursed for the cost of acquiring these skills and tools. You aren’t among this privileged group.

In government, this is called an unfunded mandate. The unlucky employee in this case is psychiatric hospitals, who aren’t eligible for Meaningful Use incentives even while Congress and the Obama administration have legislated greater accountability:

A precursor to the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 mandated that insurers must make the financial cost of benefits—co-pays, deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums—equal for psychiatric and physical care.

By making behavioral health an Essential Health Benefit, the ACA requires health plans to cover mental health on par with other types of care.

On October 1, 2012, CMS launched the Inpatient Psychiatric Facility Quality Reporting Program (IPFQR), a pay-for-reporting program in which facilities could lose federal dollars by not providing data on Hospital Based Inpatient Psychiatric Services (HBIPS):

Screening for violence risk, psycho trauma Hx, patient strengths
Hours of physical restraint use
Hours of seclusion use
Patients discharged on multiple antipsychotic medications
Patients discharged on multiple antipsychotic medications with appropriate justification
Post discharge continuing care plan created
Post discharge continuing care plan transmitted to next level of care provider upon discharge

Whether explicit or implicit, these programs amount to unfunded EHR mandates. How so?

Organizations still on paper records will find it expensive and inefficient to capture events and collect results for both reporting to government and submitting claims to insurance companies. Hospitals will need to train clinicians to document post-discharge continuity of care plans.

They will have to train staff to send plans by snail mail or fax to the provider at the next level. Then they will also need to do chart reviews to assure that all these steps took place and the data is recorded in a spreadsheet or database. Any quality improvement process that requires benchmarking and scoreboarding of performance based on these measures will be a tremendous challenge using paper records.

Mislabeling Medical Illness

Feb 12, 2013• 6

By Allen Frances, MD

Many readers of my previous blog listing the 10 worst suggestions in DSM 5 were shocked that I failed to mention an 11th dangerous mistake — that DSM-5 will harm people who are medically ill by mislabeling their medical problems as mental disorder. They are absolutely right. I apologize for my previous failure to attend to this danger and hope it is not now too late to influence the process.

Adding to the woes of the medically ill could be one of the biggest problems caused by DSM-5. It will do this in two ways: 1) by encouraging a quick jump to the erroneous conclusion that someone’s physical symptoms are ‘all in the head’; and 2) by mislabeling as mental disorders what are really just the normal emotional reactions that people understandably have in response to a medical illness.

UK health advocate, Suzy Chapman, has closely monitored every step in the development of DSM-5. Her website is the best available resource for finding just about everything you need to know about DSM-5 and ICD-11. Ms Chapman sent me a troubling email that summarizes where DSM-5 has gone wrong and the many harmful consequences that will follow. More details are available at: ‘Somatic Symptom Disorder could capture millions more under mental health diagnosis’ (http://wp.me/pKrrB-29B )

Ms Chapman writes:

…The DSM-5 Somatic Symptom Disorders Work Group is planning to eliminate several little used DSM-IV Somatoform Disorders and replace them instead with an extremely broad new category that is likely to be wildly overused (‘Somatic Symptom Disorder’ — SSD).

Continue reading…

Using Laws to Help Solve the Public Health Crisis of Mental Illness

May 17, 2011• 2

By JEFFREY SWANSON & JOHN PETRILA

May is Mental Health Month, a good time to remember the ten million adult Americans who suffer from a serious mental illness such as depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. Without proper treatment, psychiatric disorders put an enormous strain on affected individuals, family members and on society at large.

In the mid-1950s, state mental hospitals housed about a half a million people with mental illness. Many held patients against their will for decades in understaffed and deteriorating wards.

Today, most of those hospitals have been shuttered; the ones remaining hold fewer than 50,000 patients.

Taking people out of psychiatric institutions would have marked an extraordinary leap in social progress, if only it had been accompanied by a proportionate and continuing public investment in community-based mental health care. Instead, we now have a public system of mental health care that is fragmented and grossly underfunded.Continue reading…

Smoking and Mental Illness

Oct 12, 2009• 24

By MAGGIE MAHAR

At last weeks Health 2.0 Conference Maggie Mahar, author of HealthBeatBlog got more than a little feisty about Al Waxman’s suggestion that we make people with bad health behaviors pay more. She said that 95% of smokers had some form of mental illness, and therefore we were punishing the mentally ill. Really? Read on for Maggie’s explanation (lifted at her request from a comment elsewhere).—Matthew Holt

According to the New England Journal of Medicine,

“The link between smoking and anxiety also helps explain why smoking is so strongly correlated with mental illness. “smoking rates have been reported to be over 80 percent among persons suffering from schizophrenia, 50 to 60 percent among persons suffering from depression, 55 to 80 percent among alcoholics, and 50 to 66 percent among those with [other] substance-abuse problems.”

Poverty is highly correlated with smoking because poverty is stressful. U.S. soldiers also smoke in greater numbers than the population as a whole–even if they didn’t smoke before joining the army The NEJM reports:

“Serving in the military is a risk factor for smoking even for those who did not start smoking prior to the age of 18. Smoking is the number-one health problem for vets,” says Dr. Steven Schroeder, former President of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where he focused on smoking cessation. “And reports are showing that many US soldiers serving in Iraq are turning to smoking to relieve their stress.”

At the Health 2.0 conference, Al Waxman asked the audience how many thought that smokers should be “penalized” for smoking, presumably by paying more for insurance. I pointed out that the vast majority of adult smokers are poor; many suffer from some form of mental illness.Do we really want to punish people who are living in poverty and are mentally ill?