Gaps in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders Care: A Look at Causes and Solutions

Announcer:

You're listening to NeuroFrontiers on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Natalie Bareis, who’s an Assistant Professor of Clinical Behavioral Medicine in Psychiatry at Columbia University. She’ll be discussing how we can provide better care for patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, based on the finding from her recent study that only 26 percent of these patients received minimally adequate treatment in the past year. Here’s Dr. Bareis now.

Dr. Bareis:

So we actually looked into a bit more detail about what was driving this minimally adequate treatment concern, and that minimally adequate treatment equals four outpatient visits in the past year and taking an antipsychotic in the past year. So we found that people were going to outpatient care; over 50 percent were receiving outpatient mental health care. However, very few people were actually taking antipsychotics—only 30 percent. So we wanted to see what was driving that, and we found that individuals with substance use disorders were less likely to be receiving antipsychotic treatment. 

I think one thing to improve access would be to identify why clinicians are not treating folks with substance use disorders. We did find that people with substance use disorders were less likely to receive any substance use disorder treatment, so that probably interacts with the fact that they’re not getting mental health treatment also. The other thing is there are really effective treatments out there, but they’re not widely available. So we have Individual Placement and Support, we have Assertive Community Treatment, and we have Coordinated Specialty Care, but these are sometimes available only in one state or they’re available in big cities. They’re not available to folks who are in more rural areas, and policies to just get these out to folks who are in these different low-resource areas would be an ideal way to deal with this problem. 

Announcer:

That was Dr. Natalie Bareis talking about how we can provide better care for patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit NeuroFrontiers on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!