Is prioritizing good mental health the solution to our healthcare crisis?

We have seen this coming for a long time, almost as if it has been happening in slow motion.   

Our healthcare system is in crisis.   

An urgent shortage of staffing, rapidly increasing costs of providing quality healthcare services and an ever-increasing unhealthy population are creating the perfect storm of pressure on a system that is already cracking at the seams. 

There are no easy answers and there are no quick fixes.  This is a complex, systemic problem that is the result of an archaic design that no longer works.  Maybe it never worked, at least not for everyone.   

Today, healthcare is designed to help people who suffer from illness and disease. Often the patient needs are urgent, debilitating or even life-threatening.  Everything is designed to rush to the care of the patient, drawing resources from the system in a chaotic, unpredictable and almost impossible-to-plan process.  It is a reactive system. 

Talking about proactive healthcare versus reactive healthcare is nothing new.  The problem is that proactive healthcare implies that we need to invest in helping the population make better decisions that lead to healthier outcomes.  It also implies that we as individuals do have some control over whether or not we get sick.  Although simplistic as a concept, it is wildly controversial to even suggest that when someone gets sick, it may be due to their own poor choices.  It is true that in many cases illness and disease are caused by circumstances completely beyond our control whether it be from the environment, genetics or from some other external factor not related to our own decision-making.  That being said, if the population only needed the healthcare system for illnesses beyond our control, it would significantly reduce the overall demands on the system, shrink the number of health care providers required and as a result, decrease the costs dramatically. 

We all know the key pillars to good health.  But knowing these things and doing them seems to be where everything falls apart.  Our society is constructed in a way that reinforces bad behaviours.  As a result, we are overweight, addicted, burned out and desperate. Removing the temptations, however, is an impossible task for policy makers.  We live in a world of supply and demand.  If the population craves these things, then someone will produce them.  This leaves us then with the question of how might we help the population be less tempted by the harmful choices, better able to make healthy decisions? 

And this is where good mental health comes in.  When we are mentally well, when we feel balanced and completely aligned with our identity, when we love ourselves, have strong self-esteem and can deal with life’s challenges with acceptance, we won’t make harmful decisions.  Decisions that cause us harm are a numbing technique to quiet the negative thoughts, numb the pain, or distract from the low self-esteem.  Without the need to numb, the healthy choices are much easier to make. 

Therefore, in order to save our healthcare system, I propose we flip the model on its head.  We need a mental health driven healthcare system. I believe we should prioritize our money, investments, healthcare professional training and hiring into mental health care design and delivery as the foundation of our system rather than as the after thought that it is today. If everyone had access to the mental healthcare supports that they need, we would probably cut the number of patients seeking traditional healthcare in more than half. 

Transitioning from our current model to a mental health driven model is not going to be easy. Policy makers should begin to shift current and new healthcare dollars towards mental health care.  The payoffs will take time but tenacious innovation is the only option for us if we want a high-quality healthcare system that is accessible to all.