Mental Health Care Policy
Coping with coronavirus is worsening the mental health care and policy problems America was facing before anyone felt the impacts of COVID-19.
“If we don't make radical change in our approach to mental health, we're going to have a major problem in this country — particularly coming out of the COVID pandemic.”
Arthur Evans, CEO of the American Psychological Association, is a clinical and community psychologist who has created data-driven public health approaches to mental health care. He joined Call to Mind’s premiere May national program, Spotlight on Rethinking Mental Health Care, to explore historic changes to our care approaches to meet this historic need.
This spring, as we start our second year living with COVID-19, about two-thirds of Americans say they’re feeling some mental illness symptoms. More than one in five adults told Pew Research Center they experienced high levels of psychological distress in the last year. About twice as many adults in the U.S reported symptoms of anxiety or depression as the previous year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Evans, with a coalition of mental health leaders, is proposing a “Unified Vision” to reform care and policy to focus on earlier identification and support for people when they feel their first symptoms, instead of the common practice of delivering care only after someone experiences a serious, sometimes dangerous mental health problem.
“We have basically a sick care system, not a health care system, built around crisis.''
Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Tom Insel joined Evans in Spotlight on Rethinking Mental Health Care and helped create the Unified Vision plan with about a dozen of the nation’s mental health leaders to address the problems he sees as a policy leader and as former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (2002-2015).
You can hear Insel, Evans, Pooja Mehta and Amanda Lipp — both people who are shaping mental health care and policy with first-hand experience of receiving care in crisis — in the national premiere of our Spotlight series. Check out Spotlight on Rethinking Mental Health Care and help expose more people to the discussion by asking your public radio station for local broadcast information.
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