By Ted Townsend / Guest Column
The shocking deaths of fashion designer Kate Spade and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain last month seemed somehow intertwined, timed so close together as to reinforce the hidden message behind whatever drove them to suicide.
I had never heard of Kate Spade, but my wife had. Anthony was a kind of oddball idol for me. The idea of traveling the world, sampling foods and educating the masses about cultural cuisines has any number of adherents. I found his show and his life captivating, something like, “Wow, if only I could do that, what a great life!” And then he ends it all, at 61, alone in a hotel room, in a foreign land.
The physical presence, its health and well-being, are typically readily apparent. The inner self, the psyche, for good or ill, is often separated, less tangible, and much more difficult to find and navigate for both ourselves and those around us. That is true for each of us. It turns out to be true for celebrities too.
And it was that idea that these lost connections can affect anyone, even people living what looks like a perfect life of professional and personal goals, that made me think those in health care trying to put these two sides of each patient back together are onto something.
For too long, health care has divided the patient in half. If there was a medical problem, you saw one set of providers. If you had a mental health issue, you were quickly triaged out to an entirely different set of providers. Rarely did the two connect.
Even for the most talented of medical physicians, the thought of finding and treating a behavioral health problem seemed out of place, if not daunting. It led to a separation, sending this person down two disparate, but parallel, roads.
Today, we’re trying to put those back together. While too late for those who’ve chosen to end their life, it is abundantly clear there are thousands, if not millions, of others who could benefit from hitting the reset button on health care delivery.
It’s one of the reasons we felt fortunate to bring our regional UnityPoint Health resources together with AbbeHealth. They not only stretch our resources into new communities; they give us a chance to extend our service beyond the decades of acute inpatient services and the opportunity to reintegrate behavioral health into our existing clinics and reconnect behavioral health and medical care at all points along our delivery system compass.
We are not alone. Virtually every UnityPoint Health region is working to build this same kind of partnership with local behavioral health specialists, to find ways to partner, integrate care, to pull the patient back into a person.
There are things we can all do to integrate behavioral health into our lives. Keep an eye out for yourself and those around you. If someone shows a sudden change of personality, even sometimes for the better with an improvement in mood or appearing calmer and happier, take notice. If they start to act or behave recklessly, pay attention. If they increase their use of alcohol or drugs, start speaking about wanting to die, or even simply expressing feelings of hopelessness or feeling trapped, don’t just listen, offer to help. Help them reach out. There are excellent resources in our community at all hours of the day or night. Make a call to a crisis center or, if needed, a suicide prevention hotline.
At AbbeHealth, we know that many of our patients have been suicidal or have suicidal thoughts at one time or another. We’ve debriefed on three local suicides in just the past few weeks. In our Emergency Department, the highest frequency of patients presenting with a mental health concern is 15-year-olds. Working with our behavioral health colleagues versus in disconnected parallel offers us a chance to bring two sides of the same coin back together to do a better job of keeping people healthy, improving care, reducing costs, and with any luck, reducing the senseless loss of lives unfulfilled.
Ted Townsend is president and CEO of UnityPoint Health – St. Luke’s Hospital.
