Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

by Thomas Insel MD

The lessons from Collaborative Specialty Care, the Health Home, and the Friendship Bench are clear. As Francis Peabody, a famously compassionate Harvard Medical School professor said in 1927, “The secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.” As with so many problems in mental health, the solutions are not complicated. And as these examples show, they are not expensive. I sometimes feel that if you wanted to design the most expensive, least efficient, truly feckless approach to helping people with mental illness, you would probably start with emergency rooms, criminal justice, and repeated short-term hospitalizations. You would shift care to the most expensive providers. You would have your least trained, unpaid workforce address your most acute needs on crisis hotlines. And you would make sure that families and peers were left out. Sound familiar?