The current challenges of mental health and substance use disorders impact everyone—patients, doctors, hospitals, insurance providers, schools, governments, and more. By better understanding the challenges, we can work more effectively to find solutions.
Ignorance, shame, and prejudice keep people from getting the care they need.
Stigma around mental health and substance use disorders also creates barriers to jobs, military service, licensure, and housing opportunities. Negative media portrayals of mental health and substance use disorders add to the problem.
How to create change
- Make it safe and normal to talk about mental health
- Increase positive media presence through educational campaigns to news organizations, the entertainment industry, schools, workplaces, and the public
- Remove structural barriers, like a check box that requires someone to state if they’ve had a mental health illness
What our institute is doing
- “Love, Your Mind” campaign to normalize talking about mental health
- Stop Stigma Together coalition
- SafeUT partnership with the Utah Jazz for the “Take Note” anti-bullying and suicide prevention campaign
Mental health care isn’t treated equally
Our society and our systems don’t treat mental and physical health care the same. Insurance coverage for mental health care is limited, society places a lower value on mental health care, and despite as much or more training, mental health providers have lower status and pay.
How to create change
- Use data to show how treating mental health improves physical health
- Develop better ways to quantify levels of patient illness
- Prioritize policies and legislation that elevate mental health
What our institute is doing
- Crisis care that makes it easier to get help and reduces costly emergency department visits
- New Kem and Carolyn Gardner Mental Health Crisis Care Center with urgent and holistic care for all
- The Utah Behavioral Health Commission and the Utah Behavioral Health Master Plan through the Utah Hospital Association
- Create a social impact model in partnership with the Sorenson Impact Institute
We need more research to understand the brain
Our physical bodies have been studied, scanned, and scrutinized to elevate our health. But when it comes to understanding our brains and mental health, more research is needed. Unfortunately, mental health research gets less funding than other aspects of health.
How to create change
- Increase funding for mental health and substance use disorder research
- Conduct cross-functional and collaborative research
- Find innovative approaches to research and treatment
What our institute is doing
- Funding for university-wide projects
- Annual event for mental health, brain, and behavioral health research
- New translational research building for cross-discipline innovation
- New and exciting research collaborations across the University of Utah, nationally, and globally
- The 2019 Huntsman Family Foundation’s largest single gift toward mental health at the time, which set an example for future investment
We need more people to meet the needs
A critical provider shortage is impacting our nation, resulting in patients waiting months to get an appointment and providers who are stressed and burned out. Furthermore, schooling and residency training are long, education is underfunded, and licensing is difficult, often with obstacles for providers who have their own mental health conditions.
How to create change
- Expand the types of practitioners in the workforce
- Increase educational programs and opportunities
- Reduce stigma so more people want to join the profession
- Remove questions about mental health and medications from licensing applications
What our institute is doing
- More training sites for mental health trainees
- New training programs plus education tracks focused on rural, global, and forensic mental health
- New addiction medicine fellowships to serve in rural, tribal, and underserved areas
- Pilot models of care that allow practitioners to practice at their highest level of care in a team based approach
- Integrated care training for psychiatry residents and social work interns aimed at expanding the reach of mental health professionals rather than just increasing the numbers
- The first interactive brain curriculum for elementary students through high school
- CALL-UP psychiatric consult service, funded by the Utah Legislature
The economics of mental health aren’t working
Our current system makes it expensive to get preventive mental health care, costing the US economy billions of dollars a year in lost productivity. Poverty and a lack of affordable housing mean some people can’t access care, and untreated substance use disorder can lead to job loss, homelessness, and sometimes prison instead of treatment.
How to create change
- Use data and case studies to prove the value of investing in mental health care and map a better way
- Create new models of care that lower costs and increase reimbursement
What our institute is doing
- Partnership with the Sorenson Impact Institute to quantify the financial and social benefits of mental health care
- Lower costs and barriers to crisis care with our receiving center model
- Continuum of care services that allow patients to move to the right level of care
- A stepped model of care, where the most effective yet least resource-intensive treatment is delivered first
- New models of primary prevention and preemptive early interventions to prevent or minimize the impact of psychiatric illness