An op-ed published earlier this month in JAMA Psychiatry argues that our nation’s mental health system is underfunded, understaffed, and disconnected – strained further by soaring requests for help.

Authors Alexandra Moussa-Tooks, Adam Kuczynski, and Leah Gilbertson say that leads to a heavy reliance on medication and risk management, rather than interventions trying to solve the psychological and social problems that lead to behavioral crises in the first place. An over-reliance on medication obstructs pathways to recovery, they argue, not only lowering people’s faith in the help that does exist, but also increasing the risk of self-harm and suicide for patients after discharge.

The key to improving psychiatric hospital care

Psychologists, they say, are critical to changing these circumstances for the better. Though psychologists are frequently excluded from standard inpatient staffing models at psychiatric hospitals in the US, their specialized training equips them to address needs that medicine alone cannot. It also empowers them to ease the burden on psychiatrists, nurses, and social workers, improving work conditions and morale. 

Reports in the United Kingdom and on specialized units in the U.S. where psychologists have been integrated into care show better experiences and health outcomes for patients, improved well-being for providers, and reduced costs on the system overall.

But for that to work in the US, they write, more has to happen – namely pivoting the system from a focus on administration and billing goals to effective treatment, helping health systems understand the crucial need for psychologists on inpatient units, and convincing insurers and lawmakers to rewrite reimbursement structures to support psychological services.