RESEARCH WEEKLY: Mental Health System Depends on Public Finance
(March 10, 2020) In order to make real change to the mental health system, policies need to focus on addressing the paucity of resources for mental health care, writes Isabel Perera, PhD, in a powerful Health Affairs blog last week.
The capacity of the mental health system, including inpatient and outpatient services, is dependent on public, not private financing, according to her research. The results also suggest that hospital- and community-based psychiatric care are complements to each other, not substitutes. Therefore, even community services may benefit from additional resources that are allocated to inpatient psychiatric care, such as the elimination of the Medicaid Institutions of Mental Diseases (IMD) exclusion.
Combined, Dr. Perera writes these findings indicate that “more is more: More public funding is associated with more psychiatric services, and more hospital care is associated with more community care.”
Two Dogmas in Mental Health Policy
By Isabel M Perera
As the presidential race heats up, candidates are weighing in on how they would reform the nation’s broken mental health system. Pundits have linked its flaws to a range of headline issues. Behavioral health care shortages purportedly exacerbate the increased frequency of mass gun violence, the negative effects of social media, and even the anxieties produced by the economic, environmental, and immigration landscape. The mental health system is far from the cause of those problems, but politicians (on both sides of the aisle) are rightly concerned about how to end the policy chaos that leaves millions of Americans untreated, and often homeless or incarcerated instead.
Many of these policy proposals, however, contain unexamined assumptions about our current system and how it operates. In previously published research in the Lancet Psychiatry and Psychiatric Services, I used cross-national data from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to examine the economic assumptions that guide mental health policy making and found reason to doubt two common beliefs: one, about the importance of private payers, and the other, about the relationship between inpatient and outpatient care.
Read the rest of the blog post on the Health Affairs website, here.
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Elizabeth Sinclair Hancq
Research Director
Treatment Advocacy Center
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Research Weekly is a summary published as a public service of the Treatment Advocacy Center and does not necessarily reflect the findings or positions of the organization or its staff. Full access to research summarized may require a fee or paid subscription to the publications.
The Treatment Advocacy Center does not solicit or accept funds from pharmaceutical companies.
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