Macaran Baird strongly supports collaboration between mental health and medical care. He has worked tirelessly during his career trying to merge the two separate entities.

‘Mental health is just a normal part of overall health,’ said Baird, professor and head of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Minnesota.

Baird, excited to be back in Syracuse after working for eight years as chairman and professor at the State University of New York Health Science Center’s Department of Family Medicine, spoke at the 23rd annual Herbert Lourie Memorial Lecture on Health Policy on Friday.

The lecture, held at the Sheraton University Hotel and Conference Center, was sponsored by the Center for Policy Research at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the Central New York Community Foundation.

His lecture covered four main topics: a review of the integration and splitting of mental health and medical care for patients; an overview of current efforts to integrate mental and behavioral health into primary care; an introduction of new concepts assessing patient complexity; and policy suggestions to improve steps toward integration.

Baird focuses on mental health problems because he said they affect more people.

‘In fact, more people worldwide are disabled from mental health problems than medical,’ Baird said.

He said he became passionate about mental health care after growing up with a schizophrenic sister, who lost her life to suicide. After watching his sister suffer his whole life, Baird remembers walking into his college library, looking at rows of books and thinking there must an answer in there somewhere, he said.

The main mental illness Baird spoke about was depression. He said he believes that Americans are being over-medicated. Prescribed antidepressants do not significantly improve patients’ depression, he said.

A big factor for the separation of mental health and medical care is budgets and pay, Baird said. When a patient is ill, he can also be suffering from a mental illness. But this patient is seeing two separate doctors or even teams of doctors, he said. These doctors are separate and have different wages, or individual budgets.

Baird spoke of various levels of collaboration to better treat mental health patients. Doctors need to treat people as a team, he said. Baird addressed complex adaptive systems — systems of care designed to incorporate both mental and medical doctors.

‘If you don’t see the whole thing you can’t understand it,’ he said.

Baird compared functional medical teams to an organism, in that every aspect needs to join together to make one effective unit.

Baird said psychotherapy usage has plummeted, while antidepressant use has greatly increased. There has been a 68 percent increase in the use of antidepressants since the late 1990s. Baird said doctors have problems stopping over-treatment because they’re treating themselves, too.

Alison Park, a junior English and textual studies major, attended Baird’s lecture for PAF 101: ‘An Introduction to the Analysis of Public Policy.’ After attending, she said she believes there is a lot of potential policy implementation that could better patient care.

Though mental health is a neglected issue, doctors such as Baird want to unify mental health and medical care to better serve patients.

Said Baird: ‘When we split mental health from medical health, we do it great peril.’

empompel@syr.edu

Published on October 23, 2011 at 12:00 pm