Healthy People Consortium Meeting
"Implementing Healthy People 2010"
November 11, 2000

Summary of Breakout Group Discussion Concerning:
Mental Health and Mental Disorders

Long-Term Goals

• Eliminate stigma toward mental illness and the mental health profession.
• Improve quality of life for people with SMI--housing, transportation, and resources.
• Eliminate the view that divides mental from physical health, prevention from treatment, SMI from primary-care-level mental health, and substance abuse from other mental health problems.
• Address mental health and prevention.
• Include private providers among the field's data and information sources.
• Provide better treatment and coordinated treatment with the range of needed services.
• Provide adequate funding; State, Medicare, Medicaid payments for prevention. Apply parity effectively. Have universal coverage.
• Increase participation.
• Put people in treatment rather than in prison.
• Solve data and surveillance problems; have good disease burden data.

Strategies

• Involve the community and consumers from the start.
• Address cultural competence and apply culturally appropriate action throughout activities. Recognize and take account of cultural differences, including in the definitions of illness and in stressors.
• Address all relevant disparities, including age, gender, and all other cultural differences.
• Make effective use of community contact points, such as hairdressers, grocery cashiers, and universities.
• Offer a continuum of care, multiple services, coordinated help, and circles of care at sites that provide health services.
• Share universally the experience and understanding of mental health issues and discrimination.
• Examine interdisciplinary approaches, coordinate activity, and cross-fertilize ideas. Address all the areas involved--substance abuse, medical side effects, physical causes, psychosomatic issues, stressors.
• Give help respectfully. Use positive communication: address protective as well as risk factors; address mental heath issues as normal, everyday matters.
• End stigmatized portrayals of consumers, providers, and caregivers in the media.
• Increase positive, informative reporting on mental health issues.
• Use existing opportunities such as women's magazines; help them be more accurate.
• Publicize what people should look for and what they should tell the doctor.
• Use the media's power as image makers; media are crucial because of the stigma issue.
• Use the Web sites of those of us who are joined in this effort: www.4women.com and agency sites, for example. Have sites that inform the media.
• Examine the prevention aspect associated with all changes.

Participant List

Kristen Aggar
Washington Business Group on Health

Lisabeth Saunders
South Carolina Department of Health & Environmental Control

Debbie Cook
American Therapeutic Recreation Association.

Lucy Davidson
Center for Child Well-Being

Dorita Sewell
SAMHSA

Sandra Estepa
HHS Region II Office of Women's Health-New York City

Deborah Slater
American Occupational Therapy Association

Madeline Roberts
Louisiana Office of Public Health

Dorothy Hickey
Jewish Home and Hospital; State Society on Aging of New York

Anne McHugh
Massachusetts Department of Public Health

Bob McNellis
American Academy of Physician Assistants

Blanca Fuertes
HRSA/ORHP

Marion E. Primas
HRSA/BPHC/DPSP/HAS

Geri Tebo,
Arizona Department of Health Services

John Aberle-Grasse
NCHS/CDC

Laurie Robinson
DHHS/Region I Office of Women's Health

Martina Vogel-Taylor
NIH/OD

Back to Consortium 2000 Table of Contents