One in five Americans will receive a psychiatric diagnosis this year. Why isn't mental health care a bigger priority? “’Normal’ people don’t need mental health care.” That’s what we, as a culture, tell ourselves. Mental health care, after all, is for “those people." The homeless guy we drive past on our daily commute, for example, might be someone who needs mental health care--or someone with an addiction, or maybe a dangerous criminal we hear about on the news. When we h

Cognitive behavioral therapy is the gold standard for insomnia treatment. Now there's an app for it. Insomnia can be one of the most frustrating experiences of adult life. On top of losing vital sleep, one can feel helpless about how to fall asleep. It leads many patients to our practice, on its own or in combination with other issues. Unfortunately, lasting sleep improvement rarely comes from a magical formula mixed into a pill or a few words bestowed by a provider. Immed

Our PHQ-9 data collection and analysis project revealed that over time, our clients’ depression symptoms improved. The question is, why? As we revealed in our second blog entry, our independent research confirms that when it comes to treating depression, we’re doing something right. We can’t pinpoint precisely what that something is, but we do know that what we offer is very different from how psychiatry is often practiced today. In the past 20 years, insurance reimbursement

We gathered and tracked PHQ-9 test results from forty of our clients. Did we improve their mood—or did we just collect a lot of paper? In our first blog entry on this topic, we talked about why we believe tracking treatment outcomes in numbers with reliable tools, such as the PHQ-9, is key to providing a client with the best chance at achieving his or her treatment goals. Now you may be thinking, do these people really think that they can derive meaningful information on som

Definition Actuary : 1. Insurance. a person who computes premium rates, dividends, and assesses risk via probabilities based on statistical records. 2.(formerly) a registrar or clerk. Monetary risk is something we all contend with when we take out our healthcare wallet —especially when it comes to investing in mental health. Whether you’re an individual consumer or a corporation contracting for benefits, it can be hard to measure the value of a medical endeavor. How can we m

In medicine, adding the words “evidence” and “valid” to an instrument, treatment, or concept lends them a sense of gravity and certainty—almost as if the words themselves are some kind of effectiveness insurance policy. An Evidence Based Treatment is a method of care developed by experimental design and in-depth analysis of statistical data. The goal: to derive the most reliable, vetted practice guidelines for a particular diagnosis. Typical names for it are Evidence-Based Me

In this, my first contribution to the BioPsychoSocial field journal, I will introduce myself and my journey as a business administrator in the oft-confusing and frequently not-so-business-like field of outpatient psychiatry. The introduction will take the form of a list of seven facts. I have an MBA. I’ll write more about that later. You may think you already know what having an MBA means, but you may be surprised about how I’m using mine. True fact: most outpatient psy