Barriers to mental health care: Summarizing the state of a continuing problem

Daniel Saddawi-Konefka, MD, MBA, and Christine Yu Moutier, MD, are co-authors with Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH, of the special communication, “Reducing Barriers to Mental Health Care for Physicians: An Overview and Strategic Recommendations,” published in JAMA. In the opening of a conversation with Medical Economics, they discuss how that article came about and what the issue means to them.

Medical Economics: Can you talk about how that special communication came about and why it was important to bring this to public attention?

Daniel Saddawi-Konefka, MD, MBA: On a personal note, I serve as the program director for the anesthesiology residency at Mass General. And I've seen firsthand how mental health conditions get ignored or sort of framed as just a phase, something that'll pass. I see how it gets in the way of performance and well being. And then more personally, I've lost colleagues and mentees to suicide, and seeing these barriers and this treatment gap became something that was very personal and something that I felt we really ought to be able to improve.

Christine Yu Moutier, MD: Very similar for me, just, you know, many, many years in academic medicine of experiencing a disconnect between the real struggles and real human issues physicians and trainees face and kind of the environment and how that was being addressed at the time, and a lot has been changing over the years. But I think this, we felt this subject was timely, because a lot of efforts are ongoing, maybe a bit fractured and that it was time for kind of a summing up of where is the sort of state of things at this present time, and certainly in this kind of post-COVID era, the mental health of physicians and other health workers as well could not be of more importance, still. We're not over. And we always had said during COVID that the effects of this pandemic are going to be felt in terms of a mental health kind of repercussion for a long time to come. And I think we're, you know, whether you frame it in terms of COVID or other things, we're still definitely in the thick of it.