New And Practical Approaches To Mental Health

There are more and more Americans diagnosed with a mental health disorder like bipolar disorder, major depression and schizophrenia. It is estimated that one in four adult Americans experience these mental disorders according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness with 6% of these suffering a serious mental health condition.

Mental illness is considered one of the most overlooked illness in society and if left untreated can lead to employment, substance abuse, crime, homelessness and suicidal tendencies. It is also estimated that with the growing number of people diagnosed with a mental illness, only 36% of adults received appropriate medical and psychiatric treatment within a 12 month period. This was a 2005 data from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Much of these failures to treatment of many individuals with mental illness are the inability of identifying mental health conditions by primary care physicians. The importance of a method of diagnosis for mental illness or conditions that require psychiatric treatment have to be developed to make diagnosis and management of mental illness appropriate. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders is scheduled to be released in 2013 with practical information for primary care doctors in the proper diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. In this new and practical approach for the diagnosis of mental health, the usual 10 personality disorder categories are now reduced to 6 with a more in depth approach to the criteria for diagnosis for anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.

The need to identify mental disorders during any medical and psychiatric treatment was a personal experience of Thomas Griffin Jr., MD, a family physician in Oro Valley in Arizona. He stated the need for a deeper approach in the diagnosis of mental illness to prevent psychiatric mishaps as what happened to his daughter 20 years ago. An antidepressant was prescribed for his daughter intending to treat postpartum depression symptoms; she committed suicide. Her bipolar disorder was not diagnosed upon consultation that led to her tragic death.

Dr. Griffin is still in grief after losing his daughter but he stressed that if there was only a deeper diagnostic effort on his daughter’s condition then she could have been saved. Through talking with his colleagues at the American Academy of Family Physicians Scientific Assembly in Orlando, Florida last September, 2011, he was able to convince the AAFP to stress the need for primary care physicians to detect mental illness but also to apply proper treatment measures as well.

There are yet several mental disorders that are overlooked during an initial assessment in a primary care setting. There are eating disorders that are twice more common in females than in males, post partum depression that affects 10% to 15% of mothers who gives birth within a year and substance abuse which is a growing problem in most families from a low to a high income bracket family. With a new and better guideline for assessment, diagnosis and management of mental disorders, treatment will be more appropriate preventing irreversible negative effects.

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