Title: Should Mental Health Be a Primary-Care Doctor’s Job? | The New Yorker
Headings: Should Mental Health Be a Primary-Care Doctor’s Job?
Should Mental Health Be a Primary-Care Doctor’s Job?
Video From The New Yorker

Content: But even in Boston, where I practice, primary-care doctors are treating more mental illness. Some patients don’t have adequate insurance to obtain specialized mental-health care, despite legislative efforts, including the Affordable Care Act, to create parity between mental-health coverage and coverage for other medical conditions. Some people want psychiatric care without having to see a psychiatrist. Having finally confided a long-held secret of compulsive hand-washing or bulimia to me, some patients would rather not share it all over again with someone else. And some wish to avoid having, as one of my patients put it, “a psychiatric rap sheet”—a record that an insurance company, employer, or nosy family member might discover. They’d prefer to have their psychiatric diagnoses tucked discreetly between my notes about their heartburn and their eczema. Harvard Medical School’s Center for Primary Care recently announced a new program to improve the quality of psychiatric care offered by primary-care doctors. In its initial phases, it will place mental-health workers in six Boston-area primary-care clinics and target the treatment of depression. It will also outfit the clinics with videoconferencing technology to enable consultations with psychiatrists and other specialists. Programs like Harvard’s aren’t only responding to a shortage of psychiatrists, though.