My Friends in High Places on the HHS's Interdepartmental Serious Mental Illness Coordinating Committee

Move over, there's a new federal mental health committee in town.  The department of Health and Human Services has formed theInterdepartmental Serious Mental Illness Coordinating Committee.  My friends Pete Earley and Elyn Saks are both on the committee, and Pete has beenbloggingabout the committee for a couple of weeks now-- the good, the bad, the ranting, and the missed opportunities after the first day of meetings last week.  You'll be pleased to know that I didn't miss the opportunity to put in one of my concerns: I emailed Pete and Elyn to tell them how pre-authorization for medications is having a negative impact on the practice of medicine, and psychiatry in particular.  Nothing new, but it's a topic that every medical organization has been fighting for years and nothing ever gets done, so I thought I would ask that it be brought up again.  My thanks to Pete for including my concern onone of his blog posts. When people talk about serious mental illness (SMI), I always have the same reaction: What is it?  From what I can tell,  one gets the designation with a diagnosis: schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or severe depression.  Apparently it's not about illness chronicity or impairment, or spending time in institutions, or whether an illness responds to treatment.  I'm always at a loss: asI've said before, our diagnoses are not precise, prognoses can be wrong, and people can be very sick at one point in time and very well ...
Source: Shrink Rap - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Source Type: blogs