The State of Mental Health with Dr. Tom Insel

The Other 80

Former NIMH director and renowned neuroscientist Dr. Tom Insel joins Claudia to talk about the state of mental health in America today. The conversation dives into the challenges and opportunities for improvement, the potential of technology, and what it will take to scale integrated treatment approaches across the nation. Get a behind-the-scenes look at the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and learn about Tom's new company, Vanna Health, which is delivering new care and payment models for people with serious mental illness.

We discuss:

• Why he thinks the criminalization of mental illness is a fixable problem
• That people, place and purpose are the foundation of recovery
• The big engagement issue in mental health treatment
• Why Medicaid patients don’t have access to psych hospitals
• That effective crisis response is more than a new phone number

Tom talks about how mental health is the biggest health disparity in the US today:

“Someone with a serious mental illness in the United States today is probably going to die 20 to 23 years before someone without… [that’s] the greatest health disparity that we have in the United States [and] far exceeds health disparities due to race or ethnicity. But beyond that, other forms of mortality like suicide and drug overdoses, what we call the deaths of despair, have become a massive public health issue… Suicide rates are up about 30 to 35% from the turn of the century, the mortality from drug overdoses is up about five to six fold from that time. So these are huge increases… That's a crisis we need to start talking about.”

Relevant Links

Tom’s book “Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health”

More about Vanna Health

Mental health provisions in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act

Explanation of Medicaid IMD (institutions for mental diseases) Exclusion [PDF]

About Our Guest

Tom lnsel, M.D., a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, has been a national leader in mental health research, policy, and technology. From 2002-2015, Dr. Insel served as Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). More recently (2015 – 2017), he led the Mental Health Team at Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) in South San Francisco, CA. In 2017, he co-founded Mindstrong Health, a Silicon Valley start-up building tools for people with serious mental illness. Dr. Insel co-founded Vanna Health in 2022 and currently serves as Executive Chair. Vanna Health is focused on the needs of people with serious mental illness and works with community partners to provide the 3 Ps (people, place, and purpose) for recovery. In 2020, he co-founded Humanest Care, a therapeutic online community for recovery. Since May of 2019, Dr. Insel has been a special advisor to California Governor Gavin Newsom and Chair of the Board of the Steinberg Institute in Sacramento, California. He is the author of the book Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health, published by Penguin Random House. With journalist co-founders, he recently launched MindSite News, a non-profit digital publication focused on mental health issues. Dr. Insel is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and has received numerous national and international awards, including honorary degrees in the U.S. and Europe.

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