From “Eminence-based” to Evidence-based mental healthcare: Time to focus on quality and accountability

For the mental health crisis of care, quality is as much of a problem as quantity. Most people who seek mental health care for the first time are baffled by how to find a clinician. I know what many parents felt. When my daughter, Lara, finished her first semester at Oberlin, she returned home to Atlanta thin and exhausted. I was excited to have her back home and entirely clueless about her desperate struggle with anorexia. In fact, as I learned later, she had been driven by obsessions about her weight and her appearance for over a year by that point. As was true of Amy, her perfectionism and her shame at not being perfect kept her from sharing this struggle. And now, in a crisis after a year of anguish, she was asking for help. As a professor of psychiatry at the university, I should have noticed her serious mental illness, and yet I missed it. At least, now that Lara was asking for help, I should know where to find the best care. But the university had no resources specifically for eating disorders, and I could not find a center for her treatment any better than Amy’s parents had. Fortunately, Lara, ever the problem solver, found an intensive outpatient program with a superb therapist and began a long, successful road to recovery. But even as a professional in this space, I found it difficult to navigate the maze of care. The first issue is that there are so many different types of professionals: social workers, marriage and family counselors, clinical psychologists, prof...
Source: SharpBrains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Brain/ Mental Health eating disorders eminence-based care evidence-based care mental health crisis mental health providers psychiatry psychologists serious mental illness therapists therapy Source Type: blogs