It is my pleasure to share the below excerpt from a chapter I contributed a few years ago to an open-access e-book mental healthcare. My chapter is titled “The Future of Mental Healthcare: Toward an Integrative Paradigm.”
“The future of mental health care will be both daunting in its challenges and filled with the
promise of new and better ways of understanding, preventing and treating serious mental
illness. Novel approaches for assessing and treating mental illness are being shaped by
advances in neuroscience, genetics and the scientific validation of ancient healing
traditions in the social context of a growing range of expert resources and services that are
becoming possible through rapidly increasing global access to the internet. Future models
of mental health care will be determined by demographic trends and economic necessity
as well as changing social norms and increasingly holistic values among both physicians
and patients.
In the coming decades advances in conventional biomedicine will take in place in parallel
with growing insight into the mechanisms underlying non-conventional therapies.
Complementary and alternative medicine will evolve from the use of “herbs and vitamins”
to a sophisticated research-driven model of integrative medicine based on individualized
treatments incorporating biological, mind-body, informational and energy therapies
targeting complex multi-factoral causes of mental illness. Improvements in the
pharmacological management of mental illness and advances in manufacturing and quality
assurance of vitamins, herbals, amino acids and other natural products will result in more
efficacious and safer conventional and alternative treatment choices for psychiatric
disorders. Treatment protocols incorporating validated mind-body and energy therapies
will become widely used preventive therapies for maintaining optimal mental functioning
in healthy populations and will be more frequently “prescribed” for the treatment of
depression, anxiety, psychosis and other mental health problems.”
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