In response to the U.S. Health and Human Services Administration Secretary’s recent announcement regarding mental health treatment:
The California State Association of Psychiatrists, representing more than 3,000 psychiatrists across California, amplifies the American Psychiatric Association’s recent assertion that “while we support efforts to improve the quality, safety, and evidence base of mental health treatment, we strongly object to framing the nation’s mental health crisis as primarily a problem of ‘overmedicalization’ or ‘overprescribing.’ That characterization oversimplifies a complex crisis and ignores the larger reality: too many patients cannot access timely, comprehensive care, while care remains unevenly distributed across our health system. It also fails to account for persistent workforce shortages, limited psychiatric beds, inadequate visit time, barriers to psychotherapy and social supports, insufficient integration of psychiatric expertise in primary care through the Collaborative Care model, and the lack of a true continuum of care.”
We also emphasize that, as the Secretary of HHS acknowledged: psychiatric medications are lifesaving and life-improving for many individuals, and patients should not decrease or stop taking their medication without first consulting their physician.
CSAP and the APA continue to:
- “Be firmly committed to ensuring that patients have access to the full range of evidence-based treatments, including medication when clinically appropriate.
- Strongly support shared decision making between physicians and their patients to make individualized treatment decisions guided by the best available science.
- Support consistent standards for informed consent across all areas of medicine. Imposing a higher bar for informed consent for mental health treatment is stigmatizing and harms patients.
- Support an evidence-based approach to prescribing and deprescribing and better support for patients who are starting, continuing, changing, or stopping psychiatric medications.”