Demise of the Medical Model of Mental Health Care

The revolution that people foresee coming to mental health care in New York State carries risks and challenges. For some, it means the end of the medical model of care, with doctors, hospitals and medicine being tossed aside where possible. For others a transformation to patient self-directed care, independent living and people gaining greater control over their lives represents a “great leap forward” in mental health.

The US Surgeon General sounded the death knell for the old system a decade ago, summing it up like this: “So the medical model, primarily focusing on symptom relief, passes in favor of recovery, which casts a much wider spotlight on restoration of self-esteem and identity and on attaining meaningful roles in society.”

The demise of the medical model follows on the heels of events that shook up the world of psychiatry in the past decade.

In the past few years we've seen evidence of culpability of state hospital directors and their staffs who expelled thousands of sick, mostly elderly patients from the big state hospitals on Long Island to crummy nursing homes and adult homes in Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey and elsewhere.

Later came revelations that leading psychiatrists and researchers around the country including those we regularly invited to our NAMI conferences for truth and inspiration were in cahoots with the drug companies and peddled their products unashamedly. That whole world came crashing down in which we had trusted those at the top of the medical profession to explain the mysteries of these powerful diseases crippling the minds of our sons and daughters, husbands and wives.

And there came revelations about over-drugging children who couldn't learn in school and disturbed their teachers and classmates. Doctors firmly believed that pills were the only effective route to behavioral change. This came with the pharmaceutical revolution in psychiatry where most doctors now prescribed medicines for every kind of emotional and mental ailment and relegated counseling, known as “talk therapy,” to a second rung. Only later did we realize that a combination of the two--medicine and counseling--proved the best treatment approach.

Then came startling results from a top level study group, the President's Freedom Commission in 2002-03, that found that the nation's system of mental health care was a flop, costly and ill-achieving. Too many sufferers were not getting any care at all while others lacked access to housing, hospitals and outpatient facilities. Children with emotional problems were particularly limited, with a severe shortage of child psychiatrists and confusion about how to treat children's rampantly wild behavior in the classroom.

And a follow-up study reported that newer brands of anti-schizophrenia drugs, like Risperdal and Zyprexa, called “atypicals,” were no better than older drugs that had been discarded, like Haldol and Prolixin, in treatment of the most severe mental illnesses. The newer drugs couldn't be distinguished from the older ones in efficacy even though the new drugs cost several times more and were now being prescribed almost exclusively to more and more sufferers.

That gave rise to the suspicion that doctors were prescribing the same drugs the companies were paying them to promote in professional journals, at conferences and in company advertising. We read that doctors had to resign from prestigious positions with these journals and others lost their university standing as a result of exposes of tie-ins and payoffs from pharmaceutical companies.

Finally, Rising Costs and Public Disaffection

Meanwhile, the nation began feeling the high costs of mental health care, associated with not only drug prices but a growing frequency of emergency room visits and hospital stays by people facing mental crises. A small segment of this population took up the lion's share of psychiatric beds and ran up huge bills. Lawmakers grew angry at these failures in treatment and began to question the mental health industry.

Too often, the mentally ill were associated with violent acts in the news media. Calls have come from some in the field to lock up persons who can't live safely in the community with others. Such violence has antagonized the public against the mass of innocent sufferers.

Those entities paying the bill--insurance companies and state, federal and local governments--found the combined medical and mental health costs of these patients were rising faster than for any other group of patients, and they had to do something. Companies fought for years to eliminate any mental health insurance coverage in employer health plans or make it inferior to other coverage. Only recently have parity insurance bills passed in most states and at the national level.

The state has converted most of its programs to Medicaid to reduce its own spending, which has limited the ability of doctors and other practitioners to bill for services. It has also frustrated many with an overload of recordkeeping forms and payment delays. For these reasons and the fact that psychiatrists are now devoted to dispensing pills, fewer new recruits are being trained. Those who practice talk-centered therapies based on analysis have lost respect.

With the economy reeling in 2008 and -09, hospitals have closed psychiatric beds and counties have slashed community mental health budgets. The result has been growing numbers of young and disaffected men and women in jail or left homeless in our cities with their mental health needs largely unattended to. Jails have become the stopping place for those who can't get treatment in hospitals and community care.

The system appears to be coming apart. New York State's mental health commissioner, Michael Hogan, wants to move away from hospital and other institutional care to more services in the community. He would look for alternatives to the traditional doctor-medical delivery system by reforming the roles professionals play and creating incentives for better performance. His is the last word while the system struggles to redeem itself from a decade of indecision, false promises and backward steps. (Roy Neville)