We know that most mental health care happens in the family doctor’s office.
We also know that family docs
don’t have the resources to provide the best care.
At the same time,
psychiatry referrals can involve lengthy waits and you often get
limited treatment advice from one-time consults.
The result: You’re stuck with more and more sick patients who need more time than you have available, with nowhere else to send them.
Provide Better Care Without Spending More Time
We’re creating a unified, comprehensive guide that will
empower patients to take control of some aspects of their mental health care. This guide will help them to:
- understand the basics of mental illness
- understand the role of medications, therapy, lifestyle changes, etc.
- concisely identify, describe and track their symptoms and severity
- understand what different psychotropics do, what to expect, and when to ask for help
- prepare for and get the most out of a one-time psych consult
By shifting some of the burden, especially around education, off of you and onto your patients, you’ll be able to cover more ground during their appointments, spending
more time on treatment decisions and less time on explaining and extracting basic information. So your patients will have to spend more of their time, but it won’t require extra resources (that aren’t there) from the health system.
We realize this won’t be for everyone, certainly not most patients with severe mental illness. But for many of your
high-functioning patients with moderate symptoms impacting their life this is well within their abilities. Not coincidentally, these are probably the same ones who “aren’t sick enough” that you can find anyone else to see them.
We Need Your Help!
The
book is still in progress, but we’re actively looking for family doctors who might help us by both reviewing pieces of it, and also sharing some of their struggles trying to provide good mental health care.
