There is a new program at the Phoenix branch of Arizona State University. They are training people with master’s degrees in social work or a mental health field to become Doctors of Behavioral Health. The goal is for them to work closely with physicians, ideally co-located in the same office and collaborating extensively on behavioral and mental health issues as part of primary care. Diagnosis and treatment of Stress Illness would clearly be a significant part of their work.
Archive for the ‘Changing the System’ Category
Stress, Illness and Primary Care in Arizona
Monday, October 18th, 2010Stress, Illness and Primary Care in Europe (2)
Thursday, October 14th, 2010In the year I was born, James Watson and Thomas Crick were young scientists working at Cambridge University (UK) who often discussed their work over a pint at the centuries-old Eagle pub. They deduced the double-helix structure of DNA using x-ray images taken by Maurice Wilkins and especially Rosalind Franklin. (Dr. Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 and her contribution came to light only after the three men received the Nobel Prize in 1962). After the discovery, Dr Crick went to the Eagle and announced they had “found the secret of life.”
Stress, Illness and Primary Care in Europe (1)
Saturday, October 9th, 2010Yesterday I was honored to speak to primary care practitioners from Europe at the annual conference of WONCA (the first five initials of the World Organization of National Colleges, Academies and Academic Associations of General Practitioners/Family Physicians), held in Malaga, Spain. I had been invited by a varied group of remarkable clinicians including: (more…)
Psychosocial Context (2)
Monday, September 20th, 2010Continuing from the last post, recall that in my practice a large majority of over 7000 patients with medically unexplained symptoms were referred due to failure to grasp the their psychosocial issues.
Psychosocial Context (1)
Saturday, September 11th, 2010The health care system has a strong bias toward viewing people as purely biological organisms. This approach ignores two critical facts:
PsychoPhysiologic Disorders
Saturday, September 4th, 2010Following a conference about Stress Illness in Ann Arbor, MI in March 2009, a small but diverse group of medical clinicians, mental health practitioners and people with stress illness began discussing ways to improve the diagnosis and treatment. After putting on another conference in Los Angeles in March, 2010 (attended by 200 health care professionals) we were joined by a group of marketing and public relations professionals who believed in our work so much they offered their service free of charge. (One of them even put two of us, myself included, on the Rosie O’Donnell radio show.)
Screening Questionnaire for Hidden Stress
Thursday, July 1st, 2010One of the most frequent requests I receive is for a way to screen for the presence of hidden stresses. Most of those who inquire are interested in administering a questionnaire to patients/clients as they wait to see their clinician. No suitably brief, scientifically validated questionnaire exists that covers the full range of hidden stresses but I have created a reasonable question set and added it to the Book Overview section of this site.
Stress Illness and Psychiatry (2)
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010Remarkably, mental health practitioners (MHP) are largely uninvolved with the largest single group of people with mental health issues. This is because those issues are manifesting most prominently as physical symptoms. These patients find it difficult to imagine that their illness is stress-related. They seek help from medical clinicians, few of whom have formal training in stress illness diagnosis and so usually don’t refer to MHPs. Even when patients are referred, few MHPs have much experience with what to look for in a patient complaining of physical symptoms. It is uncommon for MHPs to know that they can relieve these symptoms using their usual techniques augmented by a Stress History.
Stress Illness and Psychiatry (1)
Monday, June 14th, 2010The single most common cause of symptoms that bring people to a primary care medical clinician is psychosocial stress. As readers of this blog know, few of these patients are correctly diagnosed and treated. This might lead you to wonder about what the psychiatric community is doing to solve this problem. Unfortunately, the answer is “not nearly enough.”
