Analysis of the Current Barriers to Provision of Healthcare Services to Patients With Mental Disorders

Introduction

Provision of healthcare services to patients with mental disorders faces many challenges. There are barriers from both the side of patients, service providers, and in the health service system. These barriers restrict the provision of social healthcare services and can lead to inconsistencies in healthcare service provision. The following is the analysis of the current barriers to the provision of social healthcare services.

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Patient-Related Barriers

Findings from the focus groups study show that Asian American patients with mental disorders experience many challenges in the society that makes them want to coil up with their problems without letting out or even seek medical aid from the professional psychiatrists. According to the research, the following are the major barriers in the society that prevents patients with mental disorders from seeking medical attention from psychiatrists. First, there is a lethal level of social stigma that the society associates with mental illness. According to Priester (2016), most patients with mental disorders do not want to be associated with the condition. People in society, especially those with little or no understanding of the mental disorders, consider such patients to be somehow mad. Some people do not want to even come close to patients with mental disorders. Such people feel that patients with mental disorders lack the capacity to think and reason properly. As a result, they have nothing good to share. Therefore, when patients are diagnosed with mental disorders, they tend to shrink and avoid going to psychiatrists to avoid such lethal stigma. Second, most of the patients with mental disorders are low-income earners. Psychiatry requires some fee for the service. Since these patients do not have sufficient money to fund healthcare services for themselves, they normally choose to abstain going for psychiatry and just stay unattended to. This exposes them to even worse mental conditions that would have been prevented when they seek psychiatric attention (Henderson et al. 2014). Third, Chinese patients lack trust with the social healthcare provider. Therefore, they rarely open up to share their experiences. It only becomes easier to provide adequate care for a patient who shares their experience with the social healthcare provider. If they do not share their experience, it becomes a challenge for the healthcare provider to plan for the improvement strategies for the patient's status. Besides, the Chinese patients rarely ask for help. It seems they feel that mental healthcare providers may not provide considerable help for their situation. According to Henderson (2014), patients with mental disorders believe that mental healthcare providers deal with only critical cases of mental disorders with which they do not want to associate themselves given the social stigma in the society. How will the people in the society view them? This is a very terrific worry to them, so they shrink and avoid psychiatric services. To make it worse, Asian patients see a mental healthcare provider as a last resort after trying out their traditional herbal interventions.

Barriers Related to Service Providers

Most service providers are not patient enough to bear with skeptic behaviors of the Asian patients. When a patient finds it difficult to open up and share their experiences with the mental service provider, the service provider hurriedly refers the patient to the next service provider, hoping that the patient would open up there. In addition to that, service providers have inadequate training on how to handle Asian patients adequately. Despite having basic skills of handling patients with mental disorders, most service providers do not understand how to handle the Asian population because they have a different cultural background that challenges the knowledge and skills of most service providers. Therefore, the service providers remain maimed at the encounter with the mysterious culture of this population (Priester et al. 2016). In addition to that, cultural bias is also a significant barrier to service provision among the mental health service providers.

Barriers Related to Healthcare Provision System

First, primary healthcare providers who are the principal links between patients with mental disorders and the healthcare system may have different views from those held by other specialists whose care the patient needs. Failure to connect the patient with the right specialist may result in improper coordination and the consequent break in the service provision chain. Hence, this becomes a barrier in the service provision chain. Second, the changing financial systems in the service provision system lead shifts in responsibilities. Third, cultures and ideologies differ within the medical profession concerning the proper way of administering treatment. For example, a family care doctor, an internalist, and pediatrician may have a different way of treating a patient thereby, causing inconsistencies in the delivery of medical treatment services (Priester et al. 2016).

Recommendations for Addressing Social Stigma for Patients With Mental Disorders

Educate members of the community about mental disorders and make them have positive attitudes toward those with mental disorders. By doing so, challenge every myth and stereotypical issues associated with a mental disorder to help people understand facts of mental disorders.

Support patients with mental disorders by treating them with equality, respect and dignity. Additionally, encourage them and motivate them to have a positive attitude concerning their conditions.

Educating the public will enable them to accept and care for patients with mental disorders and eradicate social stigma, which is the root cause of other barriers to providing community healthcare services. Once the social stigma is eradicated, patients will embrace mental care services because members of the society will support them. On the other hand, collaborative treatment of the patients will bring consistency in practice among various healthcare service providers and enhance seamless healthcare provision (Priester et al. 2016).

According to Marsiglia and Booth (2015), collaboration in the provision of social healthcare services would be enhanced by involving service providers and the community members in the interpretation of the data from the focus group. The platform will allow members of the society to share their views based on their various cultural beliefs and traditions. These views when combined with the knowledge and skills of the various healthcare specialists would produce strategies for conducting these recommendations in a way that is culturally sound. In addition to that, it would produce an effective mix of understanding that when combined, produce a consistent and accepted understanding of the data among both service providers and community members (Vaismoradi et al. 2013).

Culturally, Americans have an understanding of mental disorders. Patients with mental disorders are treated with respect and dignity like other persons. Our culture believes that the persons with mental disorders have the same rights as others of sound mind. At the workplace, they are normally allowed to work with other persons without any discrimination and bias whatsoever. This is reinforced by the national laws. According to my cultural values and beliefs, the focus group data reflects a very unfair society that undermines the rights of patients with mental disorders. To conduct culturally sensitive research with this group, I would need to obtain knowledge about the myths and stereotypes of the society to enable me to successfully challenge the myths and stereotypes with facts. Unless you change the people's mentality concerning the myths and misconceptions, they might not accept the truth concerning mental disorders. Knowing about myths and stereotypes held tightly by members of a community is significant in knowing how to challenge them with facts.

References

Henderson, C., Noblett, J., Parke, H., Clement, S., Caffrey, A., Gale-Grant, O., ... & Thornicroft, G. (2014). Mental health-related stigma in health care and mental health-care settings. The Lancet Psychiatry, 1(6), 467-482.

Marsiglia, F.F. & Booth, J.M. (2015). Cultural adaptations of interventions in real practice settings. Research on Social Work Practice, 25(4), 423-432.

Priester, M. A., Browne, T., Iachini, A., Clone, S., DeHart, D., & Seay, K. D. (2016). Treatment access barriers and disparities among individuals with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders: an integrative literature review. Journal of substance abuse treatment, 61, 47-59.

Vaismoradi, M., Turunen, H., & Bondas, T. (2013). Content analysis and thematic analysis: Implications for conducting a qualitative descriptive study. Nursing & Health Sciences, 15(3), 398-405.