How Families Navigate The Mental Healthcare System to Get Quality Care for a Loved One [Episode 1]

11/09/18 • 23 min

Tom O'Connor, the host of Family Psych Consumer, welcomes his listeners to his podcast community – and walks you through why Family Psych Consumer is providing consumer reporting in mental healthcare NOW and how his content helps parents and families understand the mental healthcare marketplace. Tom takes time to discuss tells his own story as a professional in the mental health care marketplace and his unique perspective as an advisor to parents and families around the US.

Tom goes into detail explaining what most listeners experience in their day-to-day life – that they are subject experts on the mental health and disabilities of their loved ones who become patients in the mental health care system. And those parents and family caregivers are marginalized as stakeholders in the treatment decisions and treatment planning for their loved one.

In a deeper dive, Tom reviews how psychiatry and mental health care do little to explain to its customers and prospective patients how to understand it, assess it, purchase it or judge its quality. So parents and families are left to guess about a medical service that is highly variable in quality and highly instrumental in the mental welfare of a loved one. He concludes with his vision for a more robust and effective mental health care delivery system designed around caregivers.

Previous Episode

Welcome to Family Psych Consumer, America’s New Place to Navigate the Mental Healthcare System

Family Psych Consumer is a next-generation community where parents and families can learn about the confusing world of mental healthcare in America. Each week, Tom and his expert guests will bring the best critical thinking, skills, and ongoing support to accelerate your learning and understanding of mental healthcare. Our goal is that every parent or family caregiver confidently and competently navigates the mental healthcare world and gets the best care, the best value, and the best peace of mind as they purchase and consume mental health treatment and services.

Family Psych Consumer de-mystifies the world of psychiatry, therapy, rehabilitation, health insurance, and the law– to reduce the chaos and cost of managing a mental illness event in your family.

Join us each week to learn better coping, gain better skills, and experience better support in the daily campaign to help your loved one AND yourself.

Next Episode

How We Should Look at Recovery from Mental Illness… and Recover Ourselves as Caregivers [Episode 2]

Recovery is a very loaded word in the mental health world. It is desperately pursued by parents with adult kids with psychiatric problems and other family caregivers. And as a concept, it has a different meaning medically than it does functionally for the patient in treatment. Parent and family caregivers need to understand the word, and its different meaning to different audiences in the treatment world so they can be prepared to realistically expect it (or not).

Most mental illnesses do not have a clear path to medical recovery; that is, getting, having, and then getting over an illness. In fact, they emerge and remain as lengthy or life-long conditions . . .and will be disabling to one’s quality of live. But recovery is attainable in one’s functional live through various rehabilitation strategies, and by utilizing hope as an emotional stamina. As a caregiver, you can understand how and where recovery can be real in a loved one’s treatment. This leads to effectively advocating recovery-oriented thinking and strategies in your loved one’s care (be it hospital, residential, or outpatient).

Being focused on functional recovery can also help your own emotional wellness so you can separate your life as a caregiver FROM your life as an individual. Your loved one’s welfare is dependent on declaring recovery goals for yourself. Taking steps to have your own recovery as a caregiver is critical to both your lives.