The increased integration of mental health care into primary care is one of my pet issues. Currently, primary care providers (PCPs), also called general practitioners, provide over half of mental health treatment in the United States – which results in up to 50% of mental health problems going unindentified, undiagnosed, and untreated through the primary care system. This is a wasted opportunity, as PCPs have significant opportunities to identify behavioral health problems early and provide interventions and treatments to prevent further deterioration.
This indicates a significant split between the physical health care and mental health care systems, where people are expected to go to their PCP for physical health issues and to self-refer to a mental health care clinic or specialist for mental health treatment. This is problematic for a whole host of reasons – primary among them the simple fact that this system simply isn’t working – even though the prevalence of mental disorders in primary care is somewhat higher than the overall population, PCPs are ineffective at identifying those people and providing them with treatment. Expecting people to identify themselves as experiencing a mental disorder, overcoming societal stigma to seek diagnosis and treatment, and assuming they have the ability to access mental health services through a fragmented and poorly financed system erects barriers to treatment that are likely insurmountable to someone experiencing an untreated mental health problem. Unsurprisingly, these barriers are likely more pronounced for already vulnerable populations such as the elderly and low-income minorities.
There are a lot of benefits to better integration of mental health care into the PCP’s role. The PCP is usually the patient’s first contact with the health care system and an individual is much more likely to know how to access care from a PCP than from an unintegrated mental health system. Patients are often more willing to attend appointments with and follow up with their PCPs because of the removal of stigma from receiving treatment. Other patients may not have meaningful access to a separate or nonintegrated mental health system, either due to financial barriers, long waiting lists, or other barriers.
The most significant problem, in my view, is the expectation that an individual should be able to determine they are experiencing a mental health problem. Given that the majority of PCPs, who have medical degrees and extensive training, fail to identify and diagnose mental health issues, expecting untrained laypeople to do so – while they are experiencing the mental health problem – is beyond absurd. It is even more absurd given that many mental health issues have a physical component. Depression results in fatigue and appetite changes, as does mania. The physical experience of a panic attack is often interpreted as a heart attack. Auditory or visual hallucinations could easily be interpreted as problems with the sensory organs themselves. This is sometimes heightened by an individual’s cultural context, as many Asian cultures describe the experience of depression almost exclusively in physical terms. Expecting an affected individual to untangle the complicated interplay of physical and mental effects and diagnose themselves with a mental health problem prior to seeking treatment is bound to fail.
Another argument in favor of integration is the huge overlap between physical and mental health problems. Estimates of this comorbidity vary wildly, but range somewhere from 20% to 80% of primary care patients (useful data, no?). Having a patient access two separate mental health care systems for their treatment ensures fragmented treatments that may contradict each other and are certainly not coordinated for maximum effect. Better integration would ensure treatments for physical and mental health issues complemented each other and treated the patient as a whole person.
This seems like an uncontroversial and common sense suggestion. It was embraced by the United States Surgeon General in 2001 and by the World Health Organization in 2008, but has seen little progress or momentum since then. Some local treatment systems are taking steps towards integration, such as these trainings done by the British Columbia health system, but there have been few steps towards addressing this issue in the larger health system.