World Mental Health Day: Addressing Mental Health in an Unequal World

This past Sunday, October 10th, was a special day. I’m not talking about the celebrations of an Octoberfest or Sunday Night Football. I’m talking about #World Mental Health Day. The goal of this day is to bring awareness to mental health illness worldwide. Over the years, we have made progress in dismantling the stigma of mental health, gaining government funding, and developing new therapies for patients struggling with these disorders. But we can’t afford to stop now.

According to the World Health Organization, depression is the most common mental health illness and a leading cause of disability.

Living in pandemic times has contributed to a rise in depression and other mental health disorders. We cannot accept this increase in mental health illness as a new normal.

World Mental Health Day encourages us to continue the conversation even when it gets difficult. Let’s get acquainted with World Mental Health Day with a little history:

• Who? The World Federation for Mental Health established this day.
• What? This year’s theme is “Mental health in an unequal world.”
• When? This day was first celebrated in 1992
• Where? This day is celebrated all over the globe!
• Why? To bring awareness, to promote advocacy, and to inform the public on mental health illness.

This year’s theme brings to light a challenging topic. This isn’t the first conversation on inequality and it won’t be the last. While we always strive to create equality, treatment of mental health disorders isn’t equal, and maybe it shouldn’t be. We cannot treat mental health illness with a cookie cutter approach. We have outgrown the one-size-fits all methodology. Assuming that one medication or treatment regimen is going to have the same impact on every patient suffering with depression or any mental health illness, just isn’t accurate.

When we talk about inequality, we have to consider that every patient has their own story. Click on this link to sign up for an information session today and see how Opus Behavioral EHR can turn inequality into individualized treatment plans carefully designed for patient and provider success.

We need to understand how these inequalities will impact access to care and therefore, treatment outcomes. How might inequality impact a patient’s treatment plans? What are we doing to address these inequalities? There are many factors to take into consideration:

• Past treatment plans
• Access to care
• Transportation reliability to attend appointments
• Medication and therapy compliance
• Failed medication trials
• Medical and psychiatric comorbidities
• Financial burden of the medication
• Patient literacy
• Patient understanding of the treatment plan
• Patient willingness to participate in the treatment plan
• Patient/provider relationship

Patients need individualized treatment plans to optimize the best outcomes for patient and provider alike.

Every day at Opus, we are helping providers treat patients as unique individuals with customization at the forefront of our technology. While we celebrate #World Mental Health Day, let’s continue to bring awareness to ways we can optimize the treatment process for patients and clinicians so we can better tackle the challenges ahead of us. Let’s continue to identify the inequalities that threaten to impact patient care so we can find ways to address them.

To learn more, schedule a time with us. See how Opus Behavioral EHR can turn inequality into individualized treatment plans carefully designed for patient and provider success.