Should mental illness be prioritized more when it relates to health care funding?

[DrParasite]

Ok I'll bite......

I have severe mental illness. Most patients I care for have severe mental illness.

most patients have severe mental illness? are you sure? would you say the majority do? and if the majority does, than wouldn't that make them the new norm, and the area of concern would be the people that don't have mental illness?

Or are you exaggerating a bit? or making a sweeping generalization not based on hard data, possibly even skewed by your own biases?

Mental health is HIGHLY neglected and misunderstood in our legislation and healthcare as compared to physical ailments.

ehhhhhh that's questionable

People complain about health care in this country, but funding is far more limited with mental health.

this I'll agree with

Many insurances do not cover residential mental health treatment. I am having to undergo residential treatment for anxiety. My family is fighting my insurance company to cover it.

that sounds true, but you have a personal interest in the situation, so you are inheritance biased and are looking for a particular outcome. But I will agree that, based on personal experience, insurance companies don't cover mental health as well as they cover physical health.

I can only imagine what it is like for those on public insurance.

no clue

I see mental health as a huge priority, and in some cases, more important than physical health.

I see it as a huge priority for you, as you are directly affected by it. I don't see it as a huge priority for people not affected by it.

Because those with severe mental illness can cause harm to others if not addressed. I see it as a public safety issue too.

So should we just lock up those who are severely mentally ill, because out of fear for the rest of society? Of course not, that's absurd. So is your claim that it is a public safety issue.

But even in EMS, I feel we do not stress mental illness enough. Why don't we offer or even mandate crisis intervention training or have a special supplemental course dedicated to dealing with mental illness? I have yet to see anything like that in Tennessee especially.

Yes we do. if you are violent and have a mental illness, LEO restrains you, and then we take you to someone who can help you. if you aren't violent, we take you to someone who can help you.

No offense, but there are a ton on mental illnesses, and none can be resolved in an hour (assuming an hour is your longest patient interaction). It's not like if you are anxious, and a person can make you no longer anxious just by talking to you for an hour. There is no quick fix to mental illness.

Do I think the mentally ill are fakers? absolutely not. Have I seen it used as a crutch? yep. does every mentally ill person deserve to be locked up? well, if they were, we wouldn't have anyone to work on the ambulances . Do I think the mentally ill should get more help, from both insurance companies and the medical community in general? absolutely.

I'm no expert in dealing with crazy people. I will leave that up to those with PhD and MD after their name. My job is to take them to those people, in a matter that doesn't get me hurt, and injures them as little as possible (restrains can suck, and chemical restraints aren't fun either, from what I'm told). We do not do treat and release for psych calls, nor should we; our job is to get them to the people who can help them.

 

[Akulahawk]

I have severe mental illness. Most patients I care for have severe mental illness.

Unless most of your patients are on a psych hold, this I doubt, if you're in EMS.

Mental health is HIGHLY neglected and misunderstood in our legislation and healthcare as compared to physical ailments.

In general, I tend to agree that Mental Health is neglected/misunderstood compared to physical ailments but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's highly neglected or misunderstood.

People complain about health care in this country, but funding is far more limited with mental health.

I do agree that mental health funding in the US is much more limited and I've seen declines in facility numbers that do inpatient care for mental health. It has become much more difficult to place people that are on psych holds than it used to be.

I see mental health as a huge priority, and in some cases, more important than physical health. Because those with severe mental illness can cause harm to others if not addressed. I see it as a public safety issue too.

No. This isn't more important than physical health. The reason is that physical health problems can cause problems that mimic psych health problems. Clear up the physical health issue (usually an infection issue) and the "psych" problem also often clears. I've seen it too often where a relatively silent UTI (especially in the elderly) is found because the patient has an acute "psych" problem. We treat the infection and suddenly the other complaint also clears up. Substance abuse issues can also easily mimic psych problems. Someone that's high on meth can quite often appear to have anxiety, Suicidal/Homicidal ideation, audio/visual hallucinations, paranoia, schizophrenia with paranoid features, and so on.

But even in EMS, I feel we do not stress mental illness enough. Why don't we offer or even mandate crisis intervention training or have a special supplemental course dedicated to dealing with mental illness?

We don't offer/mandate mental health education because a one-day or even a short-course in mental health isn't sufficient. Nothing I'm going to be able to do in a short time period is going to help much, if anything. I'm an ER nurse and as part of my education, we did a month-long rotation in mental health. There are things I learned from that experience, such as "therapeutic communications" and I can start picking out certain features of patients that have mental health problems and I can certainly offer some quick advice for what to do after the hold is done, but I'm not a mental health nurse, I don't have the training to properly evaluate whether or not to place a patient on a hold. That training is more complex, but it's different from recognizing when someone needs to be placed on a hold vs. knowing when to "break" the hold or refer to inpatient therapy. I have little doubt that a Paramedic could receive the appropriate education to place people on a hold and do it appropriately, heck Law Enforcement does this without much training either... but it takes a more proper evaluation by a LCSW, MFT, or Psychiatrist to break a hold. That means at least a Master's Degree (or higher) and experience in mental health care.