Lyda Hill’s $10 million Lone Star Prize goes to Dallas team’s Texas-size strategy to beat depression
Routine examinations provide a quick overview of your general health: your weight, your blood pressure, your bowel condition. The not-so-magical word here is “routine”: It is a simple but compelling basis that your doctor uses to document your well-being.
Extending this routine to mental health, the condition of our brains, could make life better. It could save lives.
But changing long-established routines is not an easy thing. A $ 10 million jump-start grant would certainly help.
Billionaire philanthropist Lyda Hill of Dallas awarded the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute her Lone Star Prize for a proposal aimed at transforming the way the entire medical community deals with depression.
Today’s healthcare system does not take a diagnosis of mental illness – which affects 10 to 20% of us – with the same seriousness as it does the infection with physical illness. Too often, depression is not recognized and treated early or effectively.
You don’t have to be an expert to know that. If your family has not already had any mental illness, it won’t take long to find one that does.
They may still be grieving a death related to a mental illness, looking for one of the scarce hospital beds for their kids, or confused after calling 911 for help only to land a loved one in jail, not in the emergency room.
Lyda Hill, founder of Lyda Hill Philanthropies, poses next to the figure she represents among the 121 female sculptures in a NorthPark exhibition. Her foundation announced the Lone Star Prize on Tuesday.(Lola Gomez / photographer)
The Meadows Institute’s proposal, sponsored by the Lyda Hill Philanthropies Award, aims to change these outcomes across Texas with a deceptively simple but seldom practiced response: employ the same strategies that treating heart disease and cancer in The past two decades have changed to save thousands of people’s lives and improve the health of hundreds of thousands.
Even before the pandemic, according to the Meadows Institute, barely one in 15 of the more than 1.5 million Texans who suffer from depression each year received decent care. A tragically large number of these people are among the nearly 4,000 people who die of suicide each year across Texas.
As recent evidence that COVID-19 pierced an already unsafe mental health state, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday that teen suicide attempts were up in the first half of 2021 versus the same period before Pandemic have increased dramatically.
Andy Keller, President and CEO of the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, compared the situation to what we Texans experience after a devastating hurricane or tornado.
“We see people who make their first attempts to deal with it, but then sometimes they break down,” Keller told me. “We see a lot of people struggling as things reopen to find their place in this new world. Those pre-existing epidemics of mental illness, suicide and addiction – unfortunately, they’re probably worse than ever. “
The Meadows Institute prepared its Lone Star Prize-winning response in collaboration with the Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care at UT Southwestern Medical Center and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Madhukar Trivedi, director of the UT Southwestern Center, was still dizzy when we talked about the award – and for good reason. “These kinds of investments and high-profile games take place in cancer or heart disease. When it comes to depression, it almost feels like a new day, ”he said.
Philanthropist Hill said the events of the past year made it clear to everyone that we need to find solutions to our growing mental crisis.
She was pleased that the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute won the Lone Star Prize for “pioneering a transformative strategy for identifying and treating depression that has the potential to grow well beyond our state and the rest of the country to serve as a guide ”. . “
The Meadows Institute will be recruiting health systems willing to enlist their primary care physicians for the tools and additional help needed to screen, detect, and track symptoms of depression. The Methodist Dallas Medical Center has already enrolled.
Dr. Keller hopes to expand efforts to 15 to 20 large healthcare companies that reach 10 million Texans annually to offer the new services.
“People who go to the doctor are identified early … and are treated directly by a behavioral therapist or a psychiatrist at that primary care facility,” said Dr. Basement, cellar.
The effort will also help businesses, governments, and other healthcare buyers expand access and provide better mental health and addiction support to employees.
Another goal is to provide on-site health workers with tools to screen residents in places like churches or leisure centers. This is key to reaching out to colored communities and other Texans who do not have equal access to medical care.
Work will focus on six major markets including North Texas, Central Texas, West Texas and the Rio Grande Valley.
Lyda Hill Philanthropies announced the Lone Star Prize competition in March 2020 to uncover the very best idea to improve health care, protect the environment or empower Texans’ workforce. Lever for Change, a subsidiary of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, led the process.
The Meadows-led proposal, known as the Lone Star Depression Challenge, was one of more than 170 submissions analyzed by 200 subject matter experts and ombudsmen in four categories: are they transformative, scalable, doable and evidence-based?
Dr. Trivedi has worked tirelessly for more than a decade to encourage general practitioners to equate depression, which is one of the most common mental health problems, with physical illness.
“This is about evidence-based approaches that enable someone to get the same quality from depression that they should get from high blood pressure and diabetes,” he told me.
That makes so much sense. Still, depression is still considered a mystery – and so alien to family medicine – that it is no wonder that help rarely arrives until a full mental crisis occurs.
The strict national review process associated with the Lone Star Prize gives this standard of care validity. “I’m not just saying how important and necessary this is,” said Dr. Trivedi, “but outside people say this is important.”
Dr. Keller said his team’s research has shown great potential gains under the double punch of the new approach of authentically integrated care and evidence-based screening and monitoring.
At least, he said, these factors would lead to symptom remission 40% of the time. Another 25% of depression sufferers will make significant progress.
“Chances are they won’t die of suicide and likely get back to work or school,” he said. “So two thirds of people will be good enough to go about their lives again.”
In contrast, that predicted 65% is 6% at best right now, “because we’re just missing out on the depression piece,” said Dr. Basement, cellar. “We’re just not looking and we’re not doing a good job.”
Like Dr. Trivedi directed Dr. Keller points out the stupidity of “other” mental illnesses.
“We have made great strides in heart disease and cancer, but not because we know how to better resuscitate people. That’s because we reach people before their hearts stop. “
The same strategy must apply to depression: look for risk factors. Look for early signs. Then help. Sometimes it’s as simple as making lifestyle changes or counseling.
Dr. Keller has been working in psychiatry since 1988 and has been a psychologist for 25 years. But he said that it wasn’t until 2013 – during a conversation with Linda Evans, then President of the Meadows Foundation – that he realized that he was not seeing the Mental Health Forest for the trees.
“I was busy helping the people in front of me in clinics,” he recalls. Evans challenged him by asking, “Why don’t we look at everyone’s mental health the same way we do with other markers?”
The Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute was launched a year later to identify and implement improved mental health ideas and practices.
The Lone Star Depression Challenge is going to be a tough job. But with the Lyda Hill Philanthropies Lone Star Prize as rocket fuel, I’ll bet the teams will make it.
Your success is very important to your family, mine, and tens of thousands of others. Dr. Keller told me: “Without this acceleration we might expect a waiting period of 30 years. By then, that would lose a million people across the country who do not have to die. “
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