Future of mental health?

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hopefulscribe2

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Hi there,

With the recent billion cuts to mental health and addiction, how do you feel psychiatry will be affected? Will residency positions be affected as funding will decrease?
 
No more or less than anywhere else. I don't anticipate targeted cuts to mental health.
 
Residency positions aren’t going anywhere.

I have yet to see any political cut that will significantly effect psychiatrists.

The new Medicare telehealth codes might thought.

Yeah the new codes would be what I'd be most concerned about. Saw stuff on other groups about some insurers in other states trying to pay significantly less for telemedicine codes....as usual AMA screwing us over by allowing new CPT codes but not working on figuring out some way to not allow insurers to set different rates for those codes or just continuing to modify existing CPT codes.

I won't be doing much telemed if I'm getting paid 30% less for those visits.
 
Hope they let me work at the wellness farms!!!
"I'm going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also legal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities, to understand how to talk to people. "

Let's brush up on our deprescribing skills:
 
I think if you're entering training now, you should prioritize your therapy training as much as you can. You most likely won't graduate as an expert, but you'll graduate with skills that you will continue to use and refine throughout your career, and have a baseline that you can build from.
 
I'm not sure if I support an inordinate focus on therapy. Of course it could be helpful, anything offered in residency could be, but if the idea is to somehow avoid encroachment from other types of clinicians, that's a backwards way of doing it because, on average, psychologists offer better and cheaper therapy today. As a psychiatrist, I'd certainly refer a family member to a psychologist over a psychiatrist for therapy on average. No matter how much time you dedicate to it in residency anywhere, it'll be a tiny fraction of the time the average psychologist spent. If the goal is to avoid AI encroachment (however one could possibly plan for that), it'll come for the talk therapists at the same speed as the rest of us, no doubt.
 
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