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March 1, 2024

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Easing Access to Mental Health Care

Overview

Gaining access to healthcare requires more than achieving acceptance and reducing stigma for patients with mental health illnesses.

“One person in the United States dies by suicide every 11 minutes,” notes Jorge Petit, MD, a community psychiatrist and executive healthcare leader. “The vast majority of these are preventable because there’s usually an underlying mental health condition. The issue around access is critical.”

But gaining access to healthcare requires more than achieving acceptance and reducing stigma for patients with mental health illnesses. Improved access means addressing health inequities and structural barriers that range from transportation to reimbursement.

In the underserved, marginalized and low-income communities where Petit has focused his career, significant barriers to mental health care exist beyond treatment efficacy. “We need to make it easier for people to get to their appointments,” he said, and address competing financial barriers like childcare, food and rent. “The recipient of the service is really the one who should be calling the shots about what they need, and when, where and how they need it.”

Community-based organizations can help meet the needs of individuals in the most person-centered and responsive ways, said Petit, who served as the former President and CEO for Services for the UnderServed, a non-profit health and human services agency that drives scalable solutions to transform the lives of people with disabilities, in poverty, and facing homelessness.

“When you look at the way we get reimbursed—commercial insurance versus Medicaid versus Medicare—there is a significant inequity in the way our system is structured,” according to Petit, who noted plans do not pay for mental health care in the same way they pay for primary care and other services.

Among the solutions Petit mentioned is aligning city, state and federal funding to be as person-centered as possible. “We need to be able to fund that journey based on the individual’s need, not based on the way the state or federal financing is structured,” he explained.

Even people who have private health insurance and other benefits at work can face barriers to mental health treatment. One reason, Petit noted, is that employers have long bundled counseling and treatment with non-health benefits in an employee assistance program (EAP).

EAPs are notoriously underused. But with increased awareness of mental health issues, many employers are seeking ways to reduce stigma, try new approaches to making EAPs easier to access and increase employees engagement.

A leading wellness-focused EAP is Journey Proactive, EAP. Company founder and CEO Stephen Sokoler said, “I started this company with the mission of helping people live happier, healthier less stressed lives — it’s about democratizing and destigmatizing mental health.”

Employees’ self-reports, using clinically validated assessment forms, allow Sokoler’s company to help the employees to track their own journey. The results, shared anonymously and in aggregate, help employers see how EAPs can making a difference, such as reductions in employee turnover or burnout.

Journey Proactive offers a full spectrum of mental health, including, for example, meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy and clinical support, which for has yielded a , reported a 10-fold increase in employee engagement compared to previously used EAPs, Sokoler shared.

“I was fortunate to find meditation through Buddhism, and it really changed my life,” said Sokoler. “I thought, if we can bring this and other mental health practices to people in a simple, approachable, secular, science-based way, it could really resonate.”

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