Tag:

Health Care

Bibliotherapy: Do You Really Need a Doctor or Government to Tell You to Read?

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 10/1/2024

In an article that notes there are over 100,000 self-help books (I think the actual number is much larger, since Amazon lists over 285,000 in-print self-help books), apparently Leah Price is enamored at the thought of a doctor “prescribing” reading. And a government agency — the UK’s National Health Service — endorsing the idea.

The idea of a “prescription” for a book is as ridiculous as the idea that you need to be told to shower regularly to remove the stink. Reading to understand something better is a basic skill nearly everyone should have learned in grade school.

That’s patient paternalism x2: that only a doctor could be knowledgeable enough to recommend a good self-help book and that the government needs to legitimize this practice.

10/1/2024 0 comment

Can Laypeople Replace Psychologists, Psychiatrists in the Treatment of Depression?

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 9/24/2024

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

I was recently intrigued by the claims made — and that went completely unchallenged — by Vikram Patel, a psychiatrist who was interviewed by Wired Science’s Greg Miller. I guess my expectations for something appearing on Wired should be readjusted.

Patel claimed that specially-trained health professionals could provide enough care to people that they may be able to treat clinical depression successfully. (The article suggests these are the same as “laypeople,” but really, they’re not.) With skills learned in as little as 2 days.

An amazing claim? You bet. One based in reality? Let’s find out…

9/24/2024 4 comments

Veterans Day 2013: Honoring Our Vets with Better Access to Mental Health Care

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 9/16/2024

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

This Veterans Day, we honor the sacrifices made by our veterans, fighting for freedom and liberty not only for Americans, but for people everywhere.

It’s not just the veterans themselves who face mental health issues — such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or crippling anxiety — but their families too. Families who have to cope not only with the great distances and not knowing if their soldier-husband or soldier-wife will ever return, but also with the possibly of having that person return broken. Lost. Something less-than.

And while the Veterans Administration has made great strides in providing better care for veterans in the past few years, it still has a long ways to go.

9/16/2024 0 comment

Final Rules for U.S. Mental Health Parity Released: No Surprises But Also No Silver Bullet

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 9/15/2024

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Much was made this past week about the Obama administration’s publication of the final rules that put into place the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008. Some media reports are suggesting that this will take down all barriers to mental health treatment.

However, the reality is a little bit more complicated, as I last noted in this article.

The release of the final rules will have little impact to most Americans, because most insurance companies already were complying with the interim final rules. But you wouldn’t know that from the media coverage, which glossed over this, umm, important point.

9/15/2024 5 comments

An Update on How the U.S. Affordable Care Act Impacts Mental Health Care

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 9/13/2024

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

I last wrote what the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare or the ACA) will mean to mental health treatment in the U.S. over a year ago. Since the Act’s passage and further analysis of it, it’s time to revisit this topic.

Some of the initial rosy predictions about the ACA are likely not to pan out quite as we had hoped. While the Act will indeed expand coverage and treatment options for millions of Americans who previously had little or no choice, it may also inadvertently take away some treatment options currently in widespread use.

Let’s find out why.

9/13/2024 14 comments

50 Years Later, Mental Health Care in America Still Hard to Come By

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 9/11/2024

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Next week marks the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy signing historic legislation known as the Community Mental Health Act (back when the name of legislature plainly reflected what was in it). It was the country’s boldest attempt to bring mental health care into the modern era by moving people out of inpatient psychiatric hospitals, and put them back in the community where they belong, making mental health care affordable and readily available to all Americans.

And due to the federal government slashing funding for mental health care in the 1980s, the legislation was wildly successful in emptying out state psychiatric hospitals of old. The problem is, they had nowhere to go, because the government never bothered to come anywhere close to funding community mental health centers to make them an equivalent replacement.

John F. Kennedy’s vision here was bold but sadly unrealized. Fifty years later, our biggest providers of mental health care in the U.S.A. are not hospitals or community mental health centers at all… but prisons.

9/11/2024 2 comments

The Carlat Reports: Independent Publications You Should be Reading

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 9/5/2024

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

The Carlat Reports: Independent Publications You Should be Reading Back in 2008, I met ground-breaking psychiatrist Danny Carlat. You might remember Dr. Carlat because the year before he started a blog and published an important op-ed in the New York Times about the influence that pharmaceutical companies have in marketing their drugs to physicians. (To learn more, read about it when I interviewed him here.)

What you may not have realized is that Dr. Carlat got his start with his own monthly psychiatric newsletter called, fittingly enough, The Carlat Psychiatry Report in 2003. Since its humble beginnings as a single newsletter, the Carlat Publishing empire has grown, now supporting two additional newsletters — The Carlat Behavioral Health Report, and The Carlat Child Psychiatry Report.

They’ve also just recently launched a fourth, new newsletter, The Carlat Report Addiction Treatment.

We’re pleased to be partners with Carlat Publishing in helping publish their older, past years’ archives of these newsletters over at Psych Central Professional. But we’re doubly pleased to offer our readers a special discount subscription to these independent, must-read newsletters.

9/5/2024 0 comment

Benjamin Nugent Believes He Had Asperger Syndrome — According to His Mom

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 3/7/2024

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Benjamin Nugent believes he had Asperger’s Syndrome (a milder form of austim).

Who made this diagnosis? His mom.

His mom was so convinced that her then 17-year-old teenage son had this disorder, she put in him in an educational video about Asperger’s. Asperger’s is usually diagnosed in childhood or as a young teenager, and is characterized by a severe degree of social impairment, isolation, and what others might see as eccentric behavior.

While I commend Mr. Nugent for sharing his story with the world, I have to really question his understanding of how mental disorders are diagnosed by mental health clinicians.

Here’s his story…

3/7/2024 9 comments