Mental Health First Aid
Quick Picks >>> Aug 2021
RIP hot vax summer - we hardly knew you. Please send fantasy football draft tips.
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Stuff I’ve been thinking about this month:
Could proliferation of mental health “first aid” resources diminish the impact of the acute nationwide shortage of licensed clinicians?
Stuff I read this month:
📚 Breath: Science of a Lost Art - it’s hard to say how much of the “science” is legit because a lot of the analysis comes from obscure studies or the author’s highly anecdotal self-experimentation. Nonetheless, I will be taping my mouth closed at night to see what superhuman capabilities it will unlock
✏️ Roblox is struggling to moderate re-creations of mass shootings - can somebody please check on Gen Z? Interesting read on content moderation in the ~metaverse~
✏️ The unbundling of humans (in agriculture) - great framework on how to think about AI disruption in industry
Coming soon to Vick’s Picks:
Deep dive on the medical aesthetics industry (long live $SKIN)
COVID blame game - it’s systematic inequality in healthcare and a chronically unhealthy population, not the crazy anti-vax people on TV, that are driving the continued proliferation of COVID across the US
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Everyone’s a Therapist
That the US is in the midst of a mental health crisis is well known by now.
Ultimately, the biggest driver of this mental health crisis is the acute shortage of mental health clinicians (touched on this earlier this month). The short of it is captured in the below chart, where baseline supply of clinicians (blue) significantly trails total demand (red) for mental health care.
Source: American Psychological Association Supply/Demand Model
In my opinion, there is no way that we can fill the shortage of clinicians just by training more clinicians. So what fills the gap? To an extent, it could be regular people. You. Me. Barbers. Each of us is thrust onto the frontlines of mental health care by the nature of interpersonal relationships.
Consider the role of therapists in the mental health care continuum. On the far end of the acuity spectrum, trained therapists are qualified to treat individuals with more severe mental health issues - anxiety, depression, eating disorders, bipolar disorder.
But on the lower acuity end of the spectrum - helping people deal with life stresses (grief, loss, job stress) - to what extent does someone need formal training to be able to provide more support than the “patient” would receive in the status quo (which is none, because there aren’t enough clinicians around)?
In the absence of trained clinicians, regular people are currently forced to step into roles where they are providing de-facto therapy to their friends and loved ones. And they might actually be able to take those roles and provide comparable care to licensed clinicians with a little bit of help. This Talkspace blog post touches on what a good therapist does, and what skillset a good therapist needs:
Therapy usually involves different types of counseling, which requires you to listen to your clients problems and help them come up with ways of coping. Usually sessions involve asking clients probing questions to help them understand more about themselves and identify strategies for working through their issues. Most therapists don’t offer their own advice or opinion, but rather try to push their clients to search for their own inner wisdom to solve the mental health challenges they face.
The way therapists approach therapy depends also on their particular kind of training they received. For example, a therapist who is trained in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) may focus on identifying negative thought patterns and trying to come up with ways to reframe those patterns more positively…
What Makes A Good Therapist?
Having the “helping people” bug isn’t all it takes to become a therapist. While there isn’t one personality type that is best suited become a therapist, there are some basic skills that will make you more suited to the profession, including:
High degree of emotional intelligence and awareness
Intuitive sense of how to interact with others
Strong listening skills
Strong problem-solving skills
Ability to listen to other people’s problems without judgment
Someone who is self-aware and willing to explore their own psychology and mental health struggles
Someone who is able to implement healthy boundaries when needed
Someone who is responsible and trustworthy
There are many people with the skillset described here. I doubt that you need to attend formal training in a university to “ask clients probing questions to help them understand more about themselves.” With informal training, many people may be able to enhance their “therapist” skillset, i.e. learning how to ask the right questions, how to listen/respond constructively.
With sufficient resources, significantly more people should be able to perform CBT-lite care. Arming people with the tools to be good “first responders” to mental health crises would work to create a decentralized pool of support resources that effectively increases available clinical supply while moving care upstream.
A great analogue would be the way that many people are trained today on basic physical first aid - treating wounds, CPR, administering medication. They are obviously not as qualified as actual EMTs or doctors, but they can provide sufficient care to resolve low acuity situations, meaning fewer people end up in the urgent care or ER.
We might see similar results if more people learned how to de-escalate mental health episodes experienced by their peers.
