RESEARCH WEEKLY: Serious Mental Illness Policy
By Elizabeth Sinclair Hancq
Editor’s note: May is Mental Health Awareness month and it is more important than ever to raise awareness about severe mental illness. Each Research Weekly published this month is chosen with this in mind.
In this month’s edition of Health Affairs, I published a letter to the editor in response to a controversial article in the December 2021 edition of the publication by former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) employee Dr. Jeffrey Buck. His piece questioned the validity of utilizing serious mental illness as a policy construct in health policy in the United States.
Dr. Buck argues that the “desirability” of policies focused on serious mental illness is questionable due to flaws in the policies themselves and their lack of effectiveness. However, the supposed flaws in serious mental illness policies he mentions are due to issues surrounding the definition of serious mental illness and lack of comprehensive data, rather than the actual policies themselves. Despite claiming that serious mental illness policies are ineffective, Dr. Buck provides little to no evidence to back up his claim.
The article is the antithesis of the mission and values of Treatment Advocacy Center. In fact, combatting opinions like Dr. Buck’s is one of the reasons for the founding of Treatment Advocacy Center in the first place. While the original full article is behind a paywall, Health Affairs allows public comments to be made on the article’s website at no cost, which can be done here if you would like to add your own comment in support of the validity of serious mental illness policy.
