… personally Identifiable Medical & Detailed Financial Info Being Legally Exploited/Sold Via EHR & FICO MAS: Will mental health care providers ever focus on those who have actual mental health issues? The only thing that anyone now seems to care about is addiction medicine. That is crap, drug(opioid/heroin) addicts made a choice at some point, they chose to abuse opioids and that is a crime. Crikey the dangers of opioids were the focus of a long running TV series (House), and post successful long running “DARE” educational programs, the opioid epidemic is an excuse by pharma/politicians to generate billions of PROFIT. And cartel gangs like MS-13 just exacerbated the situation/access as did the opioid bill. Hospital inpatient wards, like Sentara are all about increasing revenue/profit as well, to cut expensive nursing staff, they now have one co-ed locked ward that combines abused/trauma/MDD patients with criminals detoxing before they go to jail. There is no actual individual or group therapy, there are techs who act just as babysitters. The MDs forget to write prescriptions, and are masters of the $400 handshake. Criminals/addicts stay free get top quality concierge care, eating disorders, MDD, PTSD get screwed via $10,000 2 night stay/hold for NO CARE just when they needed a thorough health/psych eval to determine if/what other pharma based treatments might be more effective –and the therapist at the medical school said the only way was via inpatient. These are worse health care conditions than those that existed 30-50 years ago. Bottom line, addicts and autism are it. No one gives a fig about anyone else. Do you think this will ever change? If not, the suicide rate will skyrocket in the next 1-3 years. Heck, it is easy to get end of life drugs but impossible to use lethal injection for criminals on death row because no one wants to make new drugs for use in criminal lethal injections, but helping the terminally ill and elderly wanting to die by a different set of lethal drugs is cause for social celebration. So how does one tell a psychiatrist they like/worked with for a few years that in all probability, at some point a year or two down the road, there is a an increasing risk that society & low quality (value based) cheap toxic, high side effect laden generic meds and lower quality of overall drive through heath care will trigger/drive them to suicide? Especially now that every call to a GP seems to result in the receptionist asking for a social security number, and upon opening your EHR containing mental health hospitalization, dets well, immediately their tone changes to a rude condescending judgmental “you are wasting my time” because you spent time (MDD/PTSD) in the psych ward, the next available apt is 5 months from now.
I’m not sure that you have asked answerable questions. In general, it seems that you are upset about the state of mental health care in the United States. That’s a fair and legitimate complaint. Research supports the idea that not enough people are able to access treatment for their mental health problems. As a result, many people live with mental health symptoms even though evidence-based treatments exist that could help.
The best advice that I can offer is to try and find mental health professionals whom you like and trust. Overcoming mental health problems is often a matter of finding good treatment. It might take time and you likely will have to interview many mental health professionals to find what you need but it is worth the time and effort.
If you would like to write back and ask a specific question, I will do my best to answer it. Thanks for writing.
Dr. Kristina Randle
