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Point of View: Improving American Mental Health Policy
We mental health advocates all agree that America’s mental health system should be better. We do not all agree about how to make it better. That’s a problem. Our differences have contributed to a political standoff in Washington where efforts to bring about major changes in the nation’s...
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Does Medicaid Redesign Pay Enough Attention to Older Adults with Behavioral Health Needs?
Major changes to the behavioral health system in New York State are underway at the same time that there is rapid growth of the population of older adults. Will the transformation of the behavioral health system benefit older adults? It could, but it is not at all clear that it will because there...
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Substance Abuse and Misuse in Older Adults
Some years ago, we met with a group of mental health commissioners in upstate New York to raise awareness of the growing need to address problems of behavioral health among older adults as the baby boom becomes the elder boom. When we got to the topic of substance abuse, one of the commissioners...
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Integrated Treatment for Successful Aging
Contrary to the ageist assumptions of modern society, it is possible to age well. This being so, physical and behavioral health providers ought to ask themselves what they can do to promote successful aging. Part of the answer, of course, is just to provide good treatment for physical and...
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Housing for Older Adults with Psychiatric Disabilities: A Continuing Critical Need
For adults with psychiatric disabilities of all ages, stable housing is a critical need—perhaps, in fact, their most critical need. Sadly, appropriate housing is not adequately available at any age. For older adults with long-term psychiatric disabilities, finding decent, affordable, and stable...
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Will Managed Care Advance the Goals of Community Mental Health?
In the middle of the 20th century, when American mental health policy switched from institution-based to community-based, the primary goal was to enable people with severe, chronic mental illness to live freely and safely in the community with the same rights as other Americans. Considerable...
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Better Pain Management is Essential for Reducing Addiction to Prescription Painkillers
Limiting use of prescription painkillers has become a major public health goal in the United States in large part because these drugs now cause more overdose deaths than cocaine and heroin combined. (1,2) Much of this effort focuses on persuading physicians to limit the frequency and the amount of...
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“Behavioral” Health: What a Difference a Word Makes!
Mental Health News is now Behavioral Health News. It will now be reaching out to the fields of alcohol and substance abuse services and planning to expand its subject matter to include information about these fields in addition to the field of mental health. This is an exciting development that, I...
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Murders and Mental Health Advocacy: Opportunity or Temptation to Resist?
From time-to-time, a person with a severe mental illness (or assumed to have a mental illness) commits a heinous act that makes headlines. The reactive call for better mental health services is entirely predictable, not only on the part of those who are trying to distract us from issues such as gun...
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Let’s Not Forget Older Veterans
Wilbur Cohen’s account of his post-war suffering in Arthur Kleinman’s wonderful book, What Really Matters1 begins with the following: “The war. It’s what happened to me in the war. I could never get over it. But I learned to live with it. Then all of a sudden on my sixtieth birthday it...
