The numbers tell a grim story. Nationwide, 43.7 million adult Americans experienced a mental health condition during 2016 – an increase of 1.2 million over the previous year. Mental health issues send almost 5.5 million people to emergency departments each year; nearly 60% of adults with a mental illness received no treatment at all.
If that massive – and growing – need is one side of the story, shrinking resources are the other. Mental health resources had already been diminishing for decades before the recession hit – and hit them especially hard. Between 2009 and 2012, states cut $5 billion in mental health services; during that time, at least 4,500 public psychiatric hospital beds nationwide disappeared – nearly 10% of the total supply. The bulk of those resources have never been restored.
Provider numbers also are falling. “Psychiatry is probably the top manpower shortage among all specialties,” said Joe Parks, MD, medical director of the National Council for Behavioral Health. “We have about a third the number of psychiatrists that most estimates say we need, and the number per capita is decreasing.” A significant percentage of psychiatrists – more than 50% – only accept cash, bypassing the low reimbursement rates even private insurance typically offers.
Teresa Nguyen
This is all evidence of our broad unwillingness, as a society, to invest in mental health, said Teresa Nguyen, LCSW, vice president of policy and programs at Mental Health America. “If we can’t reimburse people fairly for doing really important work, we’re not going to drive up the demand for more people to think about how to better serve people from a mental health perspective.”
Hospitals, of course, feel those financial disincentives too, which discourage them from investments of their own. “It’s a difficult population to manage, and it’s difficult to manage the financial realities of mental health as well,” said John McHugh, PhD, assistant professor of health policy at Columbia University, New York. “If you were a hospital administrator looking to invest your last dollar and you have the option of investing it in a new heart institute or in behavioral health service, more likely than not, you’re going to invest it in the more profitable cardiovascular service line.”
Dr. John McHugh
Providers of last resort
But much of the burden of caring for this population ends up falling on hospitals by default. At Denver Health, Melanie Rylander, MD, medical director of the inpatient psychiatric unit, reports seeing this manifest in three categories of patients. First, there is an influx of people coming into the emergency department with primary mental health issues.
“We’re also seeing an influx of people coming in with physical problems, and upon assessment it becomes very clear very quickly that the real issue is an underlying mental health issue,” she said. Then there are the people coming in for the same physical problems over and over – maybe decompensated heart failure or COPD exacerbations – because mental health issues are impeding their ability to take care of themselves.
Some hospitalists say they feel ill equipped to care for these patients. “We don’t have the facility or the resources many times to properly care for their psychiatric needs when they’re in the hospital. It’s not really part of an internist’s training to be familiar with a lot of the medications,” said Atashi Mandal, MD, a hospitalist and pediatrician in Los Angeles. “Sometimes they get improperly medicated because we don’t know what else to do and the patient’s behavioral issues are escalating, so it’s really a difficult position.”
It’s a dispiriting experience for a hospitalist. “It really bothers me when I am trying to care for a patient who has psychiatric needs, and I feel I’m not able to do it, and I can’t find resources, and I feel that this patient’s needs are being neglected – not because we don’t care, and not because of a lack of effort by the staff. It’s just set up to fail,” Dr. Mandal said.
Ending the silo mentality
Encouraging a more holistic view of health across health care would be an important step to begin to address the problem – after all, the mind and the body are not separate.
“We work in silos, and we really have to stop doing that because these are intertwined,” said Corey Karlin-Zysman, MD, FHM, FACP, chief of the division of hospital medicine at Northwell Health. “A schizophrenic will become worse when they’re medically ill. That illness will be harder to treat if their psychiatric illness is active.” This is starting to happen in the outpatient setting, evidenced by the expansion of the integrated care model, where a primary care doctor is the lead physician working in combination with psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers. Communication among providers becomes simpler, and patients don’t fall through the cracks as often while trying to navigate the system.
Dr. Corey Karlin_Zysman
“How do we promote even more of that? If we make things easier for patients and increase the odds of compliance, then maybe they won’t need to go to the hospital,” Dr. Karlin-Zysman said. “Patients with behavioral health issues are just not getting the level of care and attention they need, and we have to figure it out. They’re going to be a bigger and bigger proportion of patients that we’re going to see in the hospital setting, but it doesn’t have to be dealt with in the hospital setting if it’s better treated in the outpatient setting.”
That idea of integration is also making its way into the hospital setting in various ways. In their efforts to bring the care to the patient, rather than the other way around, Dr. Karlin-Zysman’s hospital embedded two hospitalists in the neighboring inpatient psychiatric hospital; when patients need medical treatment, they can receive it without interrupting their behavioral health treatment. As a result, patients who used to end up in their emergency department don’t anymore, and their 30-day readmission rate has fallen by 50%.
But at its foundation, care integration is more of an attitude than a system; it begins with a mindset.
“We talk so much today about system reform, integrated systems, blah, blah,” said Lisa Rosenbaum, MD, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston. “I don’t want to make it seem like it’s not going to work, but what does it mean for the patient who is psychotic and has 10 problems, with whom you have 15 minutes? Taking good care of these patients means you have to take a deep breath and put in a lot of time and deal with all these things that have nothing to do with the health system under which you practice. There’s this ‘only so much you can do’ feeling that is a problem in itself, because there’s actually a lot we can do.”