Mental health services and outcome-driven health care

Abstract

Mental disorders and mental symptoms often go untreated in both chronic care and primary care settings. However, they covary with functional disability. They are likely to impair social and occupational function in medical outpatients and to cause excess instrumental and cognitive disability in frail older persons. In both groups, they are frequent and often remediable. The costs of untreated mental disorders are often shifted to caregivers and to society in general. To ensure adequate mental health care requires a reorientation of medical care toward optimizing function and well- being as well as longevity. Such a reorientation will necessarily entail more attention to treatable mental disorders. Research is needed to (1) develop firm knowledge on which to base integrated medical and mental health treatment and (2) evaluate the potential economic benefits of combined care. Incentives must be changed if such a paradigm of care is to prosper.