Crisis in Mental Health Care
The Need
Mental illness is the number 1 cause of disability in developed countries. In the US alone, 20% of US adults have suffered from a mental illness in the past year and 10% consider themselves recovering from substance abuse. Studies show that 50% of prisoners have a current or recent history of mental illness. The suicide rate of US veterans and US citizens, as a whole, has been increasing.
Access
Poor, rural, and minority populations have limited access to psychiatric treatment. Psychiatrists are in short supply and many are close to retirement. Funding for psychiatric residency positions is unstable, and few medical students are entering the field.
Stigma
Most patients prefer being treated in the primary care setting. Only 10% of patients referred by their primary care clinicians to an outpatient psychiatric facility, actually followed through for their first appointment. Patients, families, and clinicians prefer not to acknowledge mental health problems in themselves or their family members. Despite a recent explosion of neuroscientific research, the field of psychiatry continues to be labelled a pseudoscience, and those who practice are often mistrusted and devalued.
Primary Care Clinicians
Primary care clinicians see the majority of psychiatric patients and prescribe more psychotropic medications than psychiatrists. They usually have little formal training in psychiatry and mental illness often goes unrecognized and under-treated in the primary care setting.
Crisis in Mental Health Becomes A Public Health Opportunity
Revolutionary changes in health care give the Primary Care Psychiatry Foundation a unique opportunity to educate and train primary care clinicians, other professionals, and individuals within systems of care in the early identification, accurate diagnosis, effective treatment and appropriate referral of patients with psychiatric disorders.