CLAS: Colby Liberal Arts Symposium

Behavioral Health and Service Access

Parker-Reed, SSWAC

Historically, mental health and addiction treatment specialties have been bifurcated. Research shows that among addiction treatment programs the vast majority offer substance abuse-only services, few treatment programs offer services that address both mental health and substance abuse issues. And while many mental health programs tend to be more dual-diagnosis capable than addiction treatment programs, many are unable to actually provide services to those with co-occurring disorders. This raises a set of questions related to the kinds of services mental health and substance use disorder patients receive and what factors impact on receipt of those services. Asking these questions allows us to explore whether diagnoses are related to services (the literature suggests as much), and what patient characteristics impact on those diagnoses (the literature is less certain on this score). Specifically, we are interested in determining 1) which behavioral health diagnoses (i.e., mental health and substance abuse disorder diagnoses) yield the most services and what kinds of services those are, and, 2) what patient social characteristics impact on diagnoses (and how these are related to services). In order to do so, we examine the literature on behavioral health treatment services and derive several hypotheses related our two main questions. Then (pending IRB approval) we test these hypotheses with a set of cases for patients on an acute psychiatric unit.

https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/clas/2014/program/408