Mental Health Education For Self-Confidence
John Viola Licensed Clinical Social Worker
Learn Why Educating Mental Health Makes Sense Now!
Lean about wise conscientiousness and skilled habits. Become a self-confident mentally healthy person.
My name is John Viola, I am a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and educator. I began my practice in the late 1960s in the New York City metro area as a substance abuse counselor, educator, and administrator. In 1980 I relocated to Joshua Tree in California's Mojave Desert. I've practiced in public, non-profit, and government agencies, hospitals, colleges, public schools, and Superior Courts. I began my full-time private practice in 1984. I am processing my retirement from clinical practice to develop this website Educate Your Mental Health. My practice style is conversational. My theoretical references come from the Western Sciences, Psychoanalysis, Buddhist Psychology, and Interpersonalneurobiopsycosocial Development. Click here to learn more about John Viola's professional career.
MENTALLY HEALTHY PEOPLE ARE SELF-CONFIDENT, BECAUSE THEY POSSESS WISE CONSCIOUSNESS AND SKILLED HABITS.
Some Examples of Wise Consciousness
Clear interpersonal boundaries enable humans to correctly interpret how the actions of self and others affect outcomes. Therefore, we can accurately assign responsibility for corrective action.
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Adversity and suffering are embraced gracefully as unavoidable, natural experiences of life. Suffering cannot be denied, avoided, minimized, or covered up.
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Feelings are sensory experiences of energy absorbed from external sources and energy exchanges originating from our organs. Feeling energy is transfered throughout our body.
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Afferent bio-systems transfer feeling energy to our brain, transforming into biochemical-electric energy. Our embodied mind encodes bio-electric energy into conscious language and decodes feelings into needs and desires to plan corrective action.
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Recognizes emotions as the behavioral expressions of feelings. Character is revealed by how emotions are expressed. Best with integrity, empathy, and compassion.
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A Child only understands concrete words. They cannot adequately convert adult abstractions into the actions adults request. Time passes slower for children. A car ride feels 5 times longer to your 6-year-old than the 30-year-old parent. (30/6=5)
Some Examples of Skilled Habits
Validate all your feelings and the conscious messages your brain and mind transform into your needs and desires from the signals your feeling energy sends. In other words, you practice:
Feelings inform your needs and desires. Your needs and desires direct your corrective action.
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Assess the attitudes and moods of others in the situations you encounter, then monitor the interpersonal atmosphere to determine the parts of your personality you choose to present.
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Monitor your attitude and mood while interacting with others, assess the potential for constructive use of self, self-regulate as needed, and de-escalate tensions when possible.
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Analyze pertinent factors and options before setting your intentions, especially when corrective action is needed: Practice "Right Intention," is moral and ethically correct and, above all, achievable.
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When releasing your feeling energy, express emotion constructively, creatively, and respectfully to communicate and effect the change your right intention seeks.
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Engage in "Balanced Action," by taking care of yourself in a way that tries to take care of others. Practice "Lovingkindness" by consciously engaging in anticipatory empathy. Listen empathically and respond compassionately to others. Use empathic assertion when you need another’s attention.
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See yourself through the eyes of others. Ask yourself “Would you rather be right or rather be kind?” Calm, clear, and consistent parents raise children who learn responsibility and respect for authority and parents who are patient raise children who are loving and kind.
WHAT IS THIS WEBSITE ABOUT? AND, WHAT DOES IT OFFER?
- Wise Consciousness and Skilled Habits are needed to overcome self-doubt, a leading cause of mental suffering.
- This website teaches how to elevate self-confidence and become mentally healthy.
- It offers solutions how society can be released from the jaws MENTAL ILLNESS, PSYCHOPATHOLOGY, and PSYCHOACTIVE MEDICATIONS have on how Americans understand, and discuss mental health.
- Imagine trying to explain the sport of Baseball but you're only able to discuss Baseball errors! This is how we discuss mental health. When, where, and how often do we talk about being or becoming mentally healthy?
- Click here for this website's blogs and Click here for its articles and workbooks or Click here for a list of available classes and workshops.
- A concise history of the last four decades explains how mental health services and our mental health declined in the United States. I invite you to read next few sections to understand what went wrong and why it is necessary to: Shift our public policy to preventing mental illness.
This is the right direction
This is the right time
Enjoy puting your mental health in your hands
Lets raise future generations of mentally healthy people
A brief note about mental health diagnoses & insurance coverage in the 1950s & 60s:
- Diagnoses were based on presenting symptoms, a history of symptoms, and the patient's personality development.
- Pertinent family history was gathered and typically considered as impotant factors in the patients developmental history.
- Diagnoses, at times, were aided by the developing science of psychometrics (diagnostic testing).
- Health insurers had little incentive to provide coverage for mental health and substance abuse in the post-WWII era.
- Sixty years of state and federal legislation was required to establish and mitigate erosion to mental health parity laws.
- Click here for The Milbank Quarterly (Sept. 2010) Article: "A Political History of Federal Mental Health & Addiction Insurance Parity."
Mid-century clinicians analyzed the data they collected through:
- The clinician's theoretical references,
- His or her clinical practice experience,
- The clinician's bias, often based on socioeconomic features, such as geographic location, race, ethnicity, culture, class, education, and religion.
- DSM & DSM II's narrative descriptions of mental disorders. These manuals were poorly correlated with prevailing developmental theories, and research.
- And, above all, Mental health diagnosis could not be verified by lab tests or imaging results.Lab tests and imaging studies are important diagnostic tools in medical practice. However, today they remain unavailable to aid with mental health diagnoses.
DSM-III enabled Psychiatry and Psychotherapy to Gain Credibility from the Scientific Community
- DSM-III introduced a codified system of mental disorders (a kind of scaffold). In other words, a specific list of symptoms, including symptom frequency, severity, and the required thresholds necessary to meet diagnostic criteria for each disorder.
- DSM-III offered more than codified diagnoses. For instance, statistics, associated features, differential diagnoses, epidemiology, prognostic indications, and guidelines for treating each diagnosis.
- DSM-III ushered psychiatry, diagnosis, and treatment of mental illness from its developmental roots and narrative tradition to align with the Medical Model (Study, Diagnose, and Treat). Click here for R.D. Lang's coining of the term Medical Model.
DSM-III Improved Mental Health Diagnosis and Treatment for Some Patients
- Codifying diagnostic criteria improved the validity and interrater reliability of mental health diagnoses
- DSM-III improved the volume and accuracy of statistical data collection.
- The medical model provided a template which aided the growth of treatment protocols for differing diagnostic conditions.
- DSM-III added credibility to Psychiatry and accelerated the use of psychoactive medications and method-based treatments.
Codified Disorders, Evidence-Based Practice, and the Medical Model Created the Conditions for Managed Mental Health Care to Dominant
The APA's publications of DSM-III-1980, DSM-III-R-1987, and DSM-IV-1994 institutionalized
Codified Mental Disorders.
Medical Model, (study, diagnose & treat).
Evidence-Based Practice.
As a result, in the 1990s, health insurers were empowered to enforce Managed Care on mental health treatment.
Managed Care featured
Preferred Provider Panels
Treatment Protocols and Toolkits for Therapists
The Gatekeepers who limited patient access to treatment
Health Insurance Companies charged fees for therapists to join their Preferred Provider Panels and employed this scare tactic "... if you don't join you won't get referrals..." Practioners were coerced to sign onto their panels. Preferred Providers were contracted to comply with the insurance companies' treatment protocols and limiting treatment. Their rules were enforced by their Gatekeepers who:
- Required prior authorization from health insurers for mental health treatment.
- Required Physician referrals for psychotherapy.
- Limited the number of inpatient days and outpatient treatment visits.
- Required frequent reports seeking gatekeeper approval to continue treatment.
WAS IT MANAGED CARE, OR DID IT MANGLE CARE FOR MENTAL HEALTH PATIENTS?
Managed Care created an adversarial relationship between clinicians and insurers. I don't know who coined the term "Mangled Care," which became a common clinician reference. Insurers favored short-term, so-called evidenced-based treatments focused on symptom reduction. In other words, counting symptom numbers, scoring depressed or anxious days, and rating patient distress levels on numeric scales became fodder for practitioners' pleading requests. While gatekeepers cross-examined professional integrity with degrading questions: "Are you the kind of therapist who prefers to see your patients suffer rather than getting them on meds?" Mental health professionals were the ones being managed. Directed to focus on symptom reduction with psychoactive drugs and evidence-based practice. While patients were the ones who got mangled.
The Paralysis of Analysis
In the Managed Care era, psychoanalysis and psychodynamics were devalued. Psychiatrists withdrew from psychotherapy and became medication managers. Acting as front-line agents for insurance companies, Gatekeepers argued: "...developmental therapies lacked evidence in support of their effectiveness..." Click here for scholarly articles on the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Managed Care also ignored our cherished "Therapeutic Relationship." Despite decades of research, validating: "The quality of the therapeutic relationship is the best indicator of patient progress." Click here for scholarly articles on therapeutic relationships. Psychodynamic psychotherapy, in other words, "Applied Psychoanalysis," targets the repair of developmental failures. Such as physical, sexual, and psychological traumata, neglect, insufficient nurture, and other chronic adverse conditions that disrupted a person's:
- Sense of basic trust.
- Capacity for secure attachments.
- Ability to perceive undistorted reality.
- Character developed socialized values.
- Personality, flexible, and adaptable interpersonal skills.
- Identity, integrated sense of self-confidence with healthy boundaries defenses.
In conclusion, managed care enabled the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to increase profit and wealth by promoting symptom-relief therapies by paralyzing patient access to analysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Managed Care's Legacy in the Twenty-First Century
Manage Care and the proliferation of psychoactive drugs have been the dominant actors in mental health for four decades. In the new millennia, public, professional, and government backlash challenged some of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries' practices. I was privileged to be a lead plaintiff in a successful class action suit filed by mental health practitioners against managed care practices. Defending law suites and paying settlements motivated insurance companies to modify or remove some of their most harmful practices, such as:
- Insurance and pharmaceutical companies were forced to pay billions of dollars to individuals, families, and classes. Click here for a list of the 20 largest settlements paid by pharmaceutical companies.
- Eliminating unqualified Gatekeepers.
- Must employ qualified mental health professionals to assess the necessity for treatment.
- Eliminated or reduced prior authorization for mental health treatment.
- Prescriptions for opioids and to a lesser degree psychoactive medications have become better regulated in the hands of specialists.
- Despite this progress, managed care and pharmaceutical practices left scars on our mental health treatment and continue to limit access to care in our Country.
A 2014 Psychiatric Bulletin article (Click here) on managed care, parity legislation, and the process of mental health care addressed the following ten points
- Many practitioners feel managed care's effect on insurance benefits pushed the line from medical necessity to medically essential, or in other words, from the medically useful and desirable to the edge of malpractice.
- The criterion for admission to inpatient services has become a determination of imminent danger, not clinical need.
- Admission to a psychiatric facility is viewed as a failure of the outpatient system, not a necessary and expectable component of a comprehensive treatment system for complex disorders.
- Before DSM-III and managed care inpatient units were recovery communities. Psychotherapeutic interventions were common practice and Patients received individual as well as group therapy as part of their in-hospital treatment.
- Inpatient psychiatric care used to be focused on adjusting and stabilizing medication regimens. Now, medication is limited to danger to self or others and psychiatric care is exclusively psychopharmacotherapy.
- The number of prescriptions for antidepressants in the USA increased from 55.9 million in 1996 to 154.7 million in 2008 (an increase of 277% in 12 years) and prescriptions for antipsychotics increased from 9.3 million to 23.0 million (an increase of 248% in 12 years).
- By the end of 2010 inpatient psychiatric discharge occurs when a patient is considered not in imminent danger. Thus, inpatient Psychiatry has more in common with crisis intervention than with therapeutic care.
- Recent texts of hospital psychiatry propose a treatment plan model for 5 days thus, bringing in family members and developing discharge plans are no longer part of treatment.
- Insurance companies managed changes to the standards of mental health treatment. Limiting access to treatment and reducing the duration of care successfully reduced insurance payments for mental health by, i.e., A) The dismantling of inpatient treatment programs, B) The promoting of symptom reduction outpatient treatment, C) The use of the Evidence-Based Practice euphemism as a cover-up for discrediting psychodynamic psychotherapy, and D) Proliferation of psychoactive medications and increasing use of polypharmacy.
- The proliferation of psychoactive drugs is not a golden age of research and development (R&D) by pharmaceutical manufacturers. More likely a successfully planned business model and marketing strategy. R&D used to be the major cost of developing pharmaceuticals. Today R&D costs are largely been diverted to a bit of chemistry and a lot of marketing:
- Realigning atoms and molecules of existing drug formulas within a class.
- Replacing the inert ingredients with new fillers.
- Changing the appearance of the new preparation (shape, size, color, markings).
- Assigning new names to the modified old drug.
- Obtaining new patents for the modified drug thus blocking competitors' marketing of generic preparations for 3 years.
- Shifting the R&D savings to direct TV advertising and continuing education for physicians.
- Click here for scholarly articles on polypharmacy favoring symptom reduction over sustainable recovery
HOW THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY INFLUENCES LEGISLATORS, REGULATORS, AND YOUR MENTAL HEALTH
The Healthcare Distribution Alliance (HDA) Click here (for HDA's website) purports to be: "...the vital link™ between the nation’s pharmaceutical manufacturers, pharmacies, hospitals, and other sites of care nationwide." Bob Woodward, the renowned journalist since his seminal work on the Watergate Scandal in the 1970s calls the "AMERICAN CARTEL" (2022) Click here (for the source) "An Eye-opening and deeply documented investigation of the opioid crisis by two great reporters." Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz, the authors of "American Cartel" truthfully reveal the clandestine role of the HDA: "Four miles from DEA headquarters in northern Virginia stands the nondescript beige concrete-and-glass office building that is home to one of Washington's powerful trade associations."
The HDA's website eludes to its lobbying function that Higham and Horwitz cite. "The Alliance as it was called, served as their lobbyist, crisis manager, and legal adviser. The HDA was the nerve center for the nation's opioid distributors and became the institution that made sure Congress and regulators did not mess with the profitable nexus between drug makers and pharmacies. Few people beyond the boardrooms of the drug companies and the corridors of Capital Hill knew that The Alliance even existed."
The "American Cartel" references Joseph Rannazzisi, a registered pharmacist and licensed attorney who retired from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 2015 after serving more than 29 years in drug law enforcement. "Joe viewed the Alliance with deep suspicion as a well-financed shield for illegal behavior. In Joe's mind, the members of the Alliance didn't want to obey the law. They just want to do what they want to do, he liked to tell his staff, and what they want to do is make money. He thought that their zeal for massive profits had made them willing to dismiss any concern for the human costs of the drugs they were peddling".
Click here for HDA's opening statement testifying before the Connecticut Healthcare Cabinet on March 14, 2017. "The Healthcare Distribution Alliance’s (HDA) members work around the clock to help deliver more than 15 million prescription medicines and healthcare products each business day to over 200,000 pharmacies, hospitals, long-term care facilities, and clinics across the country to keep their shelves stocked with the medications and products that patients need every day." Though the American Cartel focused on the opioid crisis, HDA clandestine operations ensure its drug manufacturer members that Congress and regulators will not mess with their zeal for massive profits on any drug, the DEA or the FDA finds reasons to investigate. Click here for scholarly articles investigating the sale of psychoactive prescription drugs.
How The Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Were Able To Exploit The Patients' Rights Movement
The patients' rights movement in the 1970s successfully required health professionals to provide information to patients about their treatment options. Compliance with the patient's rights movement became standard medical practice by the early 1980s. Subsequently, the patient's rights movement was ripe for exploitation by pharmaceutical manufacturers. Thus, the first Direct-To-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of prescription drug campaigns was launched in the United States.
Click here for an NIH article on direct advertising of prescription drugs. That 2006 article discussed the history of DTCA and how the late 20th-Century Social movements reinforced public acceptance of DTCA:
- Securing rights for healthcare patients and consumers.
- Elevating consumer's role in health care and in the doctor-patient relationship.
- The trend toward consumer-oriented medicine.
- Health care policy debates about improving the health care system.
- Drug advertising and federal policy governing drug advertising.
- Managed care benefits favoring symptom reduction, evidence based practice, and drug-dependent treatment.
- Pathologizing normal human distress, e.g., shyness, sadness, fear, ambivalence, self-doubt, avoidance, family, relationship, and employment stress into mental illnesses that require prescriptions for costly psychoactive drugs.
I stumbled upon an interesting closed-source commercial organization. Click here for a look at Definitive Healthcare, a data collection group. I wondered about monetizing potentially privileged information and its role in aiding the pharmaceutical American Cartel.
“At Definitive Healthcare, our passion is transforming data, analytics, and expertise into commercial intelligence. We help our clients uncover the right markets, opportunities, and people so they shape tomorrow's healthcare industry."
You complete a brief contact form and are invited to take a free trial to browse our site to learn about the data within their platform. That consists of billions of medical and Rx claims. Viewers can look up procedure and diagnostic metrics, financial performance data, and other information by provider type.
- The number of providers Definitive Healthcare covers is more than 9,300 hospitals and health systems profiles.
- 2.6 million physicians and allied health professionals.
- Almost 100,000 long-term facilities.”
Kellee contacted me and arranged an upcoming video call with Brian who was quick to launch into a cheerful sales pitch. “There isn’t a prescription written, an office visit, hospital or rehab stay, or long-term care population that we don’t know about.” When Brian completed his brief, poignant pitch, he inquired what information I was seeking and how I intended to use their data. "I was interested in psychiatric hospital closures, changes in hospital stays, and outpatient mental health services for an article I am writing." Brian’s attitude abruptly changed, he was emphatic: “We do not release data for publication; our data is for commercial use only.” He quickly terminated our video call.
I wished I had the skills of an investigative journalist.
Polypharmacy: Should It Be The Future Of Mental Health Treatment?
Many healthcare professionals believe DTCA (direct-to-consumer-advertising) of pharmaceuticals for mood and other mental health conditions has resulted in the overuse of psychoactive medications and polypharmacy.
- Click here for the A, B, and Cs of psychoactive drugs, an incomplete list of 110 pharmaceuticals prescribed for mental health conditions.
- Polypharmacy is the practice of prescribing multiple drugs to treat a single condition. Or when several drugs are prescribed to treat more than one condition.
- Decades ago, TV advertising proved people could be persuaded to depend on certain necessary products before leaving home. We became convinced the advertised products would make us more likable and socially acceptable, e.g., hair cream, deodorant, perfume, teeth whitener, and many other personal care and laundry products.
- Now, DTCA of psychoactive drugs is now convincing people they need to seek treatment for conditions that may otherwise be normal adverse experiences or situations in life. Some examples are self-doubt, insecurity, shyness, frustration, irritability, fear, sadness, loss, failure, feeling uncomfortable, unpleasant mood, relationship and family tensions, work stress, difficulty expressing self, and problems regulating mood and behavior.
- Life's stressors normally produce discomfort. Our stressors are not dissipated by the consumption of alcohol, Marijuana, or psychoactive pharmaceuticals.
- Psychoactive medicines may reduce awareness of the distress we experience; after all psychoactive drugs do not solve problems or cure conditions. These drugs may relieve symptoms by numbing feelings, often with unpleasant side effects and causing drug dependencies. As such, they diminish the energy necessary to motivate corrective action. Thus, we do not improve self-doubt or the conditions causing our distress and challenging our moods and behavior.
- Continued reliance on alcohol, recreational marijuana, and prescribed psychoactive drugs delays the development of skilled habits and diminishes our coping skills and healthy defenses.
- When psychoactive medications fail a patient, some who possess wise consciousness realize pharmaceuticals that increase our ability to tolerate the intolerable diminish corrective action.
- The consciously wise patient discontinues medication and takes action to produce positive change.
- Unfortunately, DTCA encourages many patients to continue to seek pharmaceutical relief, which increasingly results in a treatment regimen of polypharmacy, thus the mistreated partner may continue to be victimized.
The Disappointing Performance Of Antidepressants Contributes To The Increased Use Of Polypharmacy In Treating Mental Health
Click here for the 2015 World Psychiatry Journal article "Antidepressants versus placebo in major depression: An Overview" which reports: "Although the early antidepressant trials showed substantial drug-placebo differences, these robust differences have not held up in the trials of the past couple of decades. As of now, antidepressant clinical trials have an effect size of 0.30, when compared to placebo. This is less than impressive." According to the 2015 World Psychiatry article: "The U.S. FDA public domain reports it was evident that the conventional wisdom of 70% response with antidepressants was at best an overestimate." In Statology effect size is a measure of the effective improvement over a placebo.
- An effect size of 0.10 - 0.30 indicates a small improvement.
- An effect size of 0.30 - 0.50 suggests a moderate improvement.
- An effect size of 0.50 or greater notes a large improvement.
The World Psychiatry Journal article notes: "The effectiveness of modern antidepressants has been questioned by placebo-controlled clinical trials and by trials based on a clinical practice model." A large-scale national experiment about antidepressant effectiveness supported by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health known as the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D)Project with more than 4000 subjects found "antidepressants led to a therapeutic response in only about 4 out of 10 depressed outpatients." Click here for a comprehensive review of the STAR*D project.
Click here for a June 2021 article in Frontiers in Psychiatry: "Psychotropic concomitant medication use for the treatment of youth with emotional and behavioral disorders has grown significantly in the U.S. over the past 25 years. The authors were: Julie M. Zito(1+2), Yue Zhu (1+3), and Daniel J. Safer (4)
- Department of Pharmaceutical Health Services Research, School of Pharmacy, Baltimore, MD, United States
- Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, United States
- Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, George Washington University, Washington, DC, United States
- Department of Psychiatry, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States
Julie Zito, Yue Zhu, and Daniel J. Safer wrote: "In fairness, early studies (prior to DSM-III) of antidepressant effectiveness in children and adolescents were conducted on hospitalized patients with melancholic and anaclitic depression (Older terminology used to describe serious depressive conditions). In contrast to contemporary studies that must consider milder forms of depression, off-label uses of antidepressants for anxiety, pain, and unpleasant mood resulting from unskilled coping with normal life stressors." These highly regarded researchers and scholars concluded:
All of which have resulted in the proliferation of psychoactive concomitant prescriptions."
Click here for scholarly articles on the proliferation of psychopharmacology. And, increasing use of multiple drugs and multiple classes of drugs to treat depression. Click here for scholarly articles on the dangers of polypharmacy.
Revisiting Post DSM-III's Legacy On Mental Health Care
Indeed, the transition to DSM-III dwarfed the theoretical and developmental view of mental suffering and the analytic and narrative psychodynamic approaches to psychotherapy. DSM-III embraced the medical model (study-diagnose & treat) and its mental disorders, and mental illness-based models of mental suffering which now dominate mental health care. Practitioners eagerly accepted the promise of payments from third-party payors (Insurance Companies) who imposed their profit-driven Managed Care on their subscribers and the providing practitioners. Under the tutelage of the American Medical Association's (AMA) American Psychiatric Association (APA) mental health practitioners have witnessed, capitulated, and now practice with:
- Mental Illnesses And Mental Disorders As Our Dominant Focus
- Codifying Psychiatric Diagnoses.
- The 57,800,000 Americans WhoT Are Diagnosed And Live With At Least One Mental Illness Click here for the 2021 National Institute of Health (NIH) Report.
- A Psychiatric Hospitalizations As A Failures of Out-Patient Care.
- The Dismantling Of Mental Health Treatments, in Psychiatric Hospitals And Psychiatric Wards in General Hospitals.
- Psychiatry Deserted Psychotherapy And Practice Psychoactive Pharmacology.
- False Claims That Analytic And Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Lack Evidence of Effectiveness.
- Symptom Relief As The Expected Outcome of Mental Health Treatment.
- Evidenced-Based Practice Is An Euphemistic Cover-Term For Short-Term Method-Based Treatments.
- Expertise In Method-Based Treatments Documented By Continuing Education Certificates.
- The Proliferation of Psychopharmacology. Click here for scholarly articles on the proliferation of psychiatric medications
- Direct-to-Consumer Advertising for Psychoactive Medications.
- The 54,367,500 Americans Who Had A Prescription For At Least One psychoactive medication in 2020. Click here for a 2022 NIMH Report. Click here for Mental Health America 2022 Ranking of all US States on the prevalence of mental illness and access to care.
- Polypharmacy As The Treatment Of Choice When The First Psychoactive Drug Fails To Produce Promised Results. Click here for scholarly articles on polypharmacy in mental health
- Deceptive Advertising Of Anti-Psychotic Drugs In The PolyPharmacy Treatment Of Depression.
- Pharmaceutical Companies Diverting Research And Development Funds To Direct-to-Consumer TV Advertising.
- The Increase Of Iatrogenic Illness Such As Drug Dependencies, Movement Disorders, And Other Side Effect Syndromes.
- Pathogenic Labeling That Entraps Children, Teens, And Adults With Psychiatric Identities.
- Disrupting Mental Growth And Development Of Consciousness, Healthy Habits, Life-Skills, And Emotional Regulation.
- Click here for scholarly articles that discuss how public policies focus on Mental Illness and Psychopharmacology become barriers to the development of mental health education and prevention programs.
MY HISTORY DETAILED HOW THE LAST FOUR DECADES
MONITIZED MENTAL HEALTH CARE IN THE U.S.A.
PROFITING INSURANCE AND PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRIES
WHILE MANY PATIENTS
ARE LEFT STRUGGLING WITH PATHOLOGIZED IDENTITIES
AND
DRUG DEPENDENCY
OUR PEOPLE AND OUR NATION NEED A PATH TO RECOVERY
My HOME PAGE took you through the four-decade decline of mental health services in the USA. My history documents this decline occurred because mental health treatment protocols and professional education have been transformed beginning with the publication of DSM-III in 1980 and the cascading developments following that publication (summarized below):
- The Codifying of Mental Disorders by DSM-III and its five subsequent editions support the belief that all people who struggle mentally are diseased with mental disorders
- The practice of treating mental struggles with the Medical Model - Study Diagnose and Treat
- Legislation requiring Health Insurance Companies to provide coverage for mental health treatment on parity with physical illness
- Health Insurers imposing and capturing control of mental health treatment with MANAGED CARE Protocols
- Insurance companies' gatekeepers impose prior authorizations and approval renewals pressuring practitioners to adopt short-term treatment protocols
- Creation of a dubious body of knowledge called Evidence-Based-Practice that was used to devalue analytic, psychodynamic, and developmental theories and practices of psychotherapy pressuring practitioners to establish symptom relief as the therapeutic goal of mental health treatment
- The introduction of Therapeutic Tools and tool kits, Method-Based Therapies, with Certifications, to create Expert Practitioners in Therapy elevating short-term, evidence-based, symptom-reduction to the standard in mental health care
- Direct patient advertising of psychoactive pharmaceutical drugs with catchy commercials that mislead patient consumers "... I gave my antidepressant a lift with ____" (never identifying the lift as an atypical antipsychotic medicine) that family of drugs will likely be reclassified with a more palatable public relations name
- Practitioners accept and encourage the proliferation of psychoactive medications and polypharmacy when a single pharmaceutical drug fails to adequately reduce symptoms
- Indeed this declining transformation including the profession of psychiatry abandoning psychotherapy to become psychopharmacologists and the dismantled in-patient psychiatric care, reducing it to the failures of outpatient treatment and only useful to house individuals for 3 to 5 days who are a danger to self or others.
Many have applauded these changes and would argue with my conclusions. Here are a few examples:
- You are a mental health consumer who seeks only symptom reduction. In that case, you are probably happy with short-term method-driven psychotherapy and the symptom relief you may have received from those methods and or the psychoactive drug or more often drugs that "...gave your initial prescription a so-called lift..." Unfortunately, your satisfaction may begin to lessen when you discover that your reduced symptoms and your dependence upon psychoactive drugs (with potential adverse side effects) have not improved your wise consciousness and skilled habits necessary to manage your life and your relationships.
- You are a psychotherapist who practices method-focused, short-term therapy with symptom improvement as the goal you seek for your clients and have developed a successful practice.
- You are a Psychiatrist who increased your revenue by practicing psychopharmacology rather than psychotherapy because you've tripled your caseload and can now bill $100, $200, or even more for a 10 to 15-minute med-check appointment and can generate up to $6,000 in revenue for eight hours of practice.
- You are a primary care physician or non-psychiatric specialist who can use psychopharmacology to help manage your patients by reducing their agitation and complaints.
- You are a CEO or a shareholder of a health insurance or pharmaceutical company and you have enjoyed the profit boom's bonuses or dividends from reducing Mental Health Services generated since 1980.
Click here for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners 2022 Annual Report (NAIC). "The health insurance industry continued its tremendous growth trend as it experienced a significant (29%) increase in net earnings to $24 billion and an increase in the profit margin to 2.4% in 2022 compared to net earnings of $19 billion and a profit margin of 2% in 2021."
Click here for the Becker's Healthcare article entitled Becker's Payer Issues: "With most healthcare organizations having now released their third quarter (2022) earnings, the gap between provider and payer profits continues to widen."
Click here for the American Psychiatric Association 2005 Psychiatric News article: "...even two decades ago (1985) Psychiatry was conscious of but become a contributor to a problem that has become worse in the past 18 years (2003). The U.S. pharmaceutical industry is one of the most profitable industries in the history of the world, averaging a return of 17 percent on revenue over the last quarter century. Drug costs have been the most rapidly rising element in healthcare spending in recent years. Antidepressants rank third in pharmaceutical sales worldwide, with $13.4 billion in sales last year (2004) alone. This represents 4.2 percent of all pharmaceutical sales globally. Antipsychotic medications generated $6.5 billion in revenue. There is widespread concern about the over-medicalization of mental disorders and the overuse of medications. Financial incentives and managed care have contributed to the notion of a “quick fix” by taking a pill and reducing the emphasis on psychotherapy and psychosocial treatments.
- You are a Federal or State Legislator or Senator who has enjoyed the increased campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Plus the political cover you receive from blaming Mental Illness to cover up your legislative inattention to the underlying hazardous social conditions that cause mental problems. Potentially a quid pro quo between the insurance and pharmaceutical companies and the United States Congress.
Click here for the June 9, 2021, STATnews.com article Perscription Politics "Seventy-two senators and 302 members of the House of Representatives cashed a check from the pharmaceutical industry ahead of the 2020 election."
Click here for scholarly articles on the correlation between hazardous social conditions and the causes of mental problems. For more than a century the sciences and practices of Sociology, Social Work, Social Psychology, Social Anthropology, Medicine, Public Health, Investigative Journalism, and many other academic and practice disciplines have documented how unattended hazardous social conditions cause mental trauma and mental problems. Here are some examples of those conditions largely ignored or inadequately attended to by the United States Congress:
ALCOHOLISM *** CHILD ABUSE *** DEPRESSED WORKER WAGES AND BENEFITS *** DISCRIMINATION
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE *** DRUG ADDICTION *** EXPLOITIVE WORKPLACES *** FAMILY DYSFUNCTION
GUN VIOLENCE *** HOMELESSNESS *** HOSTILE WORKPLACES *** HUMAN TRAFFICKING
INADEQUATE ACCESS TO CHILDCARE -- HEALTHCARE -- HOUSING -- LEGAL SERVICES -- SOCIAL SERVICES
INADEQUATE HOUSING *** INDEBTEDNESS *** MASS SHOOTINGS *** POLITICAL DYSFUNCTION
POVERTY *** PREDATORY LENDING *** RAPE *** SOCIAL ISOLATION ***VIOLENT CRIME
IF YOU ARE A PERSON WHO HAS STRUGGLED WITH YOUR MENTAL HEALTH THROUGHOUT YOUR LIFE OR DURING PERIODS OF HIGH STRESS
Then you have probably struggled with
Understanding Your Feelings As Different From Your Emotions and
The Absence of Practices that Master Skilled Habits to Embrace All that You Feel and Confidently Express Your Emotions
Click here for Class # C01 and Workshop # W01
Or you have struggled with what I call the
QUARTET OF SELF DOUBT
ANXIETY *** WORRY *** PROCRASTINATION *** DEPRESSION
Click here for Class # CO2 and Workshop WO2
THEN YOU NEED TO EDUCATE YOUR MENTAL HEALTH WITH THE
Wise Consciousness and Skilled Habits to embrace what you feel and effectively express your emotions that overcome your self-doubt
Likely the major cause of your mental suffering
- This website will teach you how you can elevate your self-confidence and become the mentally healthy person you deserve.
- This website will teach our collective consciousness can be released from the jaws of "MENTAL ILLNESS" that PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSES, BIG PHARMA, and INSURANCE COMPANIES " have used to train our society to misperceive mental health problems as illnesses and disorders. And how an enlighten population can require our legislators to ensure that Educating Our Mental Health is cost effective and prevents mental problems.
- Click here for this website's blogs and Click here for its articles and workbooks or Click here for a list of available classes and workshops.
Parents and extended family members historically were the primary educators of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. Modernity has added childcare workers and preschool personnel often referred to as early childhood educators. children and adolescents' confidence and mental health. Teachers and significant community members also are valuable contributors to raising mentally healthy youths. This website offers Mental Health Education that develops and supports adults ability to teach the Wise Consciousness and Skilled Habits necessary for young people to acquire basic trust, emotional regulation, secure attachments, identity integration, and confidence:
a) Embrace and validate all feelings,
b) Convert feeling energy creatively into effective, emotional expression,
c) Construct behavior that balances self-care with compassion and kindness to others.
4) Current public policy focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. This approach covers the political need to address the social, economic, and educational conditions that are the causes of mental suffering. Public policy needs to develop the socioeconomic and educational conditions to teach Wise Consciousness and Skilled Habits that prevent mental suffering and raise confident, mentally healthy people. This website will provide written material and educational programs to assist in this effort to raise public awareness.
5) Educating the Mental Health of our population will require the shifting of our available mental health resources - consider; 1) More than 300,000 mental health professionals are employed by government, public, and non-profit agencies. 2) Estimates suggest 75,000 mental health clinicians are in private practice. 3) Approximately another 24,000 clinical associates or interns are in agencies and practices acquiring the necessary experience before sitting for license examinations. 4) Additionally, there are an unknown number of counselors and personal coaches who practice in numerous venues in our country.
a) Daily, our U.S. population is gainfully engaged in our social institutions. Schools, colleges, universities, companies, jobs, offices, shops, markets, online, houses of worship, retail outlets, social media, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, agencies, non-profit organizations, municipal offices, legislative bodies, and state, and county agencies.
b) Imagine a National Policy entitled "Educate Your Mental Health" is achievable by embedding the nearly half-million mental health professionals in our social institutions. Imagine those mental health professionals engaged in real-time problems where people live and work. Imagine mental health workers who can intervene in problem-solving while teaching the Wise Consciousness and Skilled Habits necessary for self-healing, basic trust, emotional regulation, secure attachments, identity integration, confidence, and mental health.
Educate Your Mental Health
To Achieve Your Goals
Welcome to this website to share the knowledge and wisdom I've acquired in my social work practice that began in the late 1960s. This website invites you to embrace everything you feel, identify what you need and desire, and acquire the necessary skills to actualize your potential, accomplish your goals, and achieve happiness.