Morehouse is Home to New Center for Mental Health Policy and Research

Former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy and former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, M.D., last month announced the formation of the Kennedy Center for Mental Health Policy and Research at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. The center will be part of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute and will collaborate with the Kennedy Forum, a think tank founded by Kennedy and dedicated to furthering research into neuroscience and mental health.

David Hathcox

“The center will increase the visibility of mental health policy issues and solutions among the public, policymakers, and the community,” said Morehouse President and Dean Valerie Montgomery Rice, M.D., at a press conference in Washington, D.C. “It will address not just health disparities but ways of achieving health equity by discovering and promoting best practices in the treatment of mental illness and addiction.”

“Both Patrick Kennedy and David Satcher are extraordinary leaders, and we look forward to continuing to work closely with them,” said APA President Paul Summergrad, M.D., who attended the event.

Besides urging more research into neuroscience, Kennedy emphasized the core need to fully implement and enforce mental health parity to ensure that patients are getting the care to which they are entitled under the law.

“The promise is there, but the practice is not,” he said. “We need full disclosure and transparency by insurance companies to be able to compare mental health and physical health benefits.”

Kennedy also reiterated the treatment needs of veterans, most of whom do not go to Veterans Health Administration facilities for mental health care.

“Veterans are covered by their employers’ insurance, so parity is important to them,” he said.

Yet another way to overcome the artificial division between physical and mental health is to integrate care, a practice now being tested at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, said Satcher, whose 1999 report on mental health was a landmark in the field.

“We volunteered to take over mental health services in the emergency room and improved the care of patients by reducing waiting times by 80 percent, use of restraints by 70 percent, and costs by 40 percent,” said Satcher. “At Grady, we treat people as whole persons and respond to their needs, whatever they may be.”

While Grady serves an inner-city population in Atlanta, the vision of “community” at the new Kennedy Center will be much more expansive, said Rice. “Our community will not have borders and won’t be defined by race, ethnicity, or ZIP code.”

The announcement came in the context of a national public-opinion survey of 800 registered voters commissioned by the Kennedy Forum. The survey reported that 66 percent of Americans believe that mental health conditions are a “very serious” problem in the United States. About 71 percent also said they would support “radical” or “significant” changes to the mental health system, an idea that received bipartisan support: 64 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats agreed. ■