Schizophrenia? They call it behavioral health now

What does that mean?

Did you notice the behaviorists are changing the vocabulary on us?. The nabobs at the head of our federal mental health establishment like SAMHSA (substance abuse and mental health services administration) are now using the term “behavioral health care” to mean serious mental illness along with addictions and lesser mental problems. When the term is used to lump together mental illnesses like schizophrenia with substance abuse it indicates we are mainly looking at behavior and that isn't the central point about schizophrenia. Treating the illness is. There must be something behind it.

I suggest policy leaders at SAMHSA and the doctors and researchers and think tanks they do business with have invented the new behavioral health care terminology as cover to hide a variety of sins. They haven't had much success with solving the problems of schizophrenia and how the brain works in the research field. Both community and hospital care for the mentally ill are getting too expensive to go on growing indefinitely. And there's a flap all over the country about over-drugging children and over-medicalizing the treatment of serious mental illness in adults that has more than its share of critics.

Otherwise why would they call treatment of mental illnesses like schizophrenia “behavioral health care”? Surely the two concepts are separate and can't be combined. But they use the two interchangeably.

Look at the stuff they are putting out. SAMHSA is promoting the mental health patient recovery movement, the idea that even people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or severe depression can recover, perhaps fully. It wrote a release recently to announce it awarded grants to five national behavioral health care provider associations to hasten adoption of recovery-oriented practices in the delivery of mental health services. Two of them are the American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association, sure to benefit from the booming business ahead. Why would SAMHSA refer to them this way?

The NY State commissioner of mental health, Michael Hogan, uses the term, too. In an article in the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare's recent issue, he writes, “the general health sector, without our help, is incapable of reliably delivering good behavioral healthcare. We see this across the life span in care for depression.” What? Hasn't the psychiatric profession relied on general practitioner doctors for a century to treat ordinary depression in their patients?.

The National Association of Community Health and Developmental Disabilities Directors claims to be the national voice for county and local behavioral health and developmental disability groups. Its aims are to improve behavioral health services. Dr. Ron Mandershein, director of their group, asks members: “Will counties become the locus for a behavioral health/medical health home? That would be a kind of one-stop service center for people with mental illness and substance abuse problems.

A related group called ACMHJA, the College for Behavioral Health Leadership, held a summit recently for national behavioral health leaders, meaning those in mental health and addictions treatment.

Milbank Memorial Fund has issued a report on integrating primary care and behavioral health care. It speaks of “coordinated care services delivery models—those that connect behavioral and physical health.” It doesn't mean just drug addiction services—they're combined with mental health care plus general medicine in their usage..

The trouble with the combining form is that historically, behavioral health has referred to substance abuse and addiction, not psychiatric health. It has to do with people's behavior, not the illness itself. And while people with serious mental illness have some odd behaviors indeed, the focus is on the symptoms themselves and the services that doctors and medicine and organized systems of hospital and community care can afford this population.

Now, people with drug addiction can be sick, too. They need medical care and counseling and the rest. But their condition, for most of them, is volitional—they take drugs, abuse drugs, commit crimes for drugs, wind up in jail and prison for drugs, and can get off drugs and get clean if they want. A smaller number, I believe, has a greater propensity for being addicted to drugs than other people. This appears to be genetic and is also the product of their environment. We live at a time when illegal drugs are often available and people have the freedom to take them. However, like being obese or smoking cigarettes, taking drugs is a liberty that can be abused and costs the rest of us a high price.

The people with a schizophrenia don't think of their illness as volitional. They didn't bring it on themselves. It's stigmatizing and cruel. It's in a separate world from the addictions recovery business. (Roy Neville)