Transformation of Mental Health Care in America

Mental illness is a highly prevalent class of diseases with potentially debilitating affects. About 30% of Americans have a mental illness and almost half (46%) will have a mental illness at some time in their lives.  Examples of mental illness include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety disorders. A paper by Glied and Frank (2016) summarizes the transformation…

Mental Health Stigma

In this day and age, does having a mental illness still carry a stigma?  According to research by Prashant Bharadwaj, Mallesh M. Pai, Agne Suziedelyte, the answer is yes. Comparing self-reports to administrative data records on diagnosis and prescription drug use, we find that survey respondents under-report mental health conditions 36% of the time when asked…

Why doesn’t evidence based medicine spread faster?

One reason is that physicians may value their own experiences (i.e., learning by doing) over the accumulated experience across many providers.  A paper by Berndt et al. (2015) look at physician prescribing patterns of antipsychotic.  They note that some physicians concentrate in prescribing specific antipsychotics and others concentrate on prescribing other ones. The authors claim the…