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Integrative Mental Health
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What is Integrative care?
Integrative care intelligently combines evidence-based non-drug options with the best of conventional medicine to improve patient outcomes. It offers a strong wellness focus, a large menu of options, and a multi-dimensional view of the complexity of being human.
Integrative Mental Health brings integrative care to those in mental distress. It uses personalized approaches that seek to detect and address the unique causative factors of distress for each individual.
Dr. Andrew Weil explains.
Courtesy Dr. Andrew Weil.
Paradigm Shift to Integrative Mental Health
7 Dimensions of change
Mental health care is undergoing a significant paradigm shift driven by the reality that psychiatric drugs can't adequately address the growing mental health challenge.
The emerging paradigm – Integrative Mental Health – accepts drug therapy when needed, but asserts that evidence-based non-drug options are vital. Integrative Mental Health practitioners are changing and improving psychiatry in seven significant dimensions (see graphic).
The new paradigm does not seek to eliminate the old, but to build upon it; to provide a much more solid scientific foundation and a significantly larger set of solutions to help people recover. It also uses a much more collaborative, self-determined, and harm-avoidance approach to care.
Download the FREE Monograph the explains the paradigm shift to
Integrative Mental Health.
The Web of Causation
of mental distress
An eminent psychiatrist calls psychiatry the "least medical of all medical branches" [1] - not to slam his own profession, but to highlight that psychiatry has strayed from a key medical fundamental.
The discipline rarely considers why their patients are in distress. It doesn't seek causes, but delves into symptoms, and prescribes drugs to reduce those symptoms.
Integrative practitioners, however, seek to bring psychiatry to the medical mainstream. They work to understand and treat the causes that lie beneath the symptoms. They probe for markers of biological, social, and behavioral factors unique to the individual.
Since our mind and body are so tightly entwined, these factors appear to interact in a dynamic web of causation that we don't fully understand. (See graphic). It is clear that certain factors can be both causes and effects.
Some people have one factor that predominates. Others strain under the accumulated weight of many smaller issues. And sometimes a minor incremental stressor can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and ushers in a crisis of mental distress.
Since everyone's constellation of factors is different, integrative practitioners look beyond a "one size fits all" drug approach which is rarely satisfactory.
They use disciplined diagnostic procedures to discover the most out-of-balance factors and then work to improve them. This helps enhance core wellness which often improves symptoms, sometimes dramatically.
The infographic highlights many causative factors that can disrupt mental well-being.
Moving from Symptoms to Causes...
Integrative Mental Health holds tremendous promise for those in mental distress. Its practitioners can perform biomedical testing, psychosocial evaluation, and probe personal history to search for the unique causative factors for each individual.
They address suspected factors selecting from a menu of 27 evidence-based nondrug options. These include diet, exercise, digestive care, calming practices, nutrient supplements, herbs, psychological therapies, and much more. Nearly all these options have very low or no side effects and can be used with drugs.
In thousands of cases, these customized interventions have significantly decreased symptoms, allowing drug dosages, and associated side effects to be greatly decreased. In some cases, symptoms are completely eliminated without drugs.
...While Reducing Long-term Costs
The holistic and wellness-focused approaches of Integrative Mental Health can not only improve medical outcomes, but reduce long-term costs.
Dr. Andrew Weil explains.
Courtesy Dr. Andrew Weil.
[1] Ghaemi N, Choosing a Specialty: A Letter to a Medical Student, Medscape, 2017, https://goo.gl/vijyMe.