SMI Adviser to Sponsor Sessions on Serious Mental Illness

SMI Adviser, APA’s Clinical Support System for Serious Mental Illness, is supporting a special session on gender identity and mental health at this year’s Annual Meeting.

The session, “Breaking Down the Binary: Best Practices for Supporting the Mental Health of Gender-Expansive People,” is one of six sessions of interest to practitioners treating people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression.

The sessions sponsored by SMI Adviser include the following:

• Digital Psychiatry: Integrating of Patient Monitoring in Clinics (Saturday, May 21, 1:30 p.m.-3 p.m.) Increasingly, mental health professionals are turning to telehealth solutions to deliver patient care. These trends, accelerated by COVID-19, are now becoming the standard of care, and all mental health professionals must now become competent regarding the professional, clinical, legal, cultural, and safety considerations demanded by new modes of clinical care using technology. Some of these technologies involve remote monitoring of patients. This talk will focus on smartphone apps and wearables as the most common monitoring tools. Attention will be focused on the safe, ethical, and professional use of these data.

  The session will be chaired by Brent Gregory Nelson, M.D., adult interventional psychiatrist and chief medical information officer at PraireCare in Minneapolis. Presenters include John Torous, M.D., director of the Digital Psychiatry Division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Julia Tartaglia, M.D., a psychiatry resident at Zucker Hillside Memorial Hospital and a digital and behavioral health researcher. The discussant will be Smita Das, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., chair of the APA Council on Addiction Psychiatry.

• Digital Psychiatry: ABCs: Apps, Bots, and Clinical Interventions Offered by Technology (May 21, 4 p.m.-5:30 p.m.) Digital technology now offers interventions including cognitive-behavioral therapy apps and virtual reality-based exposure therapies. This session will help mental health clinicians to assess the risks and benefits of these new interventions, understand their evolving evidence base, and make informed decisions regarding their use in clinical settings. The chair of the session is Torous, and presenters include Steven Richard Chan, M.D., M.B.A., a clinical informatics and digital health fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, and John Luo, M.D., the director of Consultation Liaison & Emergency Psychiatry and the psychiatry residency program director at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. The discussant is Darlene Rae King, M.D., a senior psychiatry resident at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.

• Digital Navigators: Your Guides to Making Technology Work for Your Patients With SMI (May 22, 4 p.m.-5:30 p.m.) Increasing access to care for people with SMI is critical. Emerging hybrid models of care that incorporate in-person visits or telehealth along with the use of digital apps have shown promise. During this interactive session, experts in digital technology will introduce the concept of the Digital Navigator as a member of the treatment team and a key to hybrid care for people with SMI. The Digital Navigator is able to serve both patients and mental health professionals in three ways: Teaching digital literacy, technology setup and troubleshooting, and evaluation of new and existing applications and supporting patients in their use of apps and mental health professionals in the aggregation of data. The speakers will present a training module for the Digital Navigator and conduct a role play to highlight how the navigator would function in a real-world setting. The session is chaired by Torous, and speakers include Sherin Khan, L.C.S.W., vice president of operations and strategy at Thresholds and Erica Camacho, M.S., clinical research assistant, and Danielle Currey, B.S., research assistant, both in the Division of Digital Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

• Breaking Down the Binary: Best Practices for Supporting the Mental Health of Gender-Expansive People (May 24, 4 p.m.-5:30 p.m.) Transgender and nonbinary identities are increasingly recognized but not always well understood. This session aims to help psychiatrists bridge that gap. During this session experts will review terminology and concepts essential to understanding gender diversity as it relates to mental health practice. The session will include several case presentations highlighting those intersections, with a particular emphasis on multiple minority identities. Attendees will be encouraged to reflect on their personal trajectories of understanding and expressing gender to better support patients in their own journeys. The session will be chaired by Lisa A. Razzano, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and speakers include Surya Sabhapathy, M.D., M.P.H., an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Caleb Reyes, M.D., a psychiatrist with Howard Brown Health.

• Persons With Serious Mental Illness With Criminal System Involvement: An Overview and Guide for Practitioners (May 24, 4 p.m.-5:30 p.m.) Individuals with SMI are at increased risk for arrest and incarceration. Once they are involved in the criminal system, they face numerous challenges including additional stigma. They may also exhibit behaviors that were adaptive in correctional settings but become maladaptive in other settings. Many of these individuals have histories of trauma, and their exposure to criminal justice processes can be further traumatizing. Some have co-occurring antisocial personality features.

  These features present numerous challenges to mental health professionals, who may have limited knowledge of the criminal justice system. As patients move from arrest to court proceedings to jail or prison and release, there may be opportunities to foster continuity of care and attention to aspects of their lives that can reduce their risks of further involvement in the criminal justice system.

  Debra Pinals, M.D., chair of the APA Council on Psychiatry and the Law, will provide an overview of the risk of criminal involvement of people with SMI and will offer practical information for practitioners to better serve their patients.

• Addressing the Physical Health Needs of Patients With SMI: Emerging Roles for Psychiatrists (May 24, 4 p.m.-5:30 p.m.) Patients with SMI have higher rates of medical morbidity and die 10 to 20 years earlier than the general population. Speakers will present a framework that psychiatrists can use for better integration of health, mental health, and social services for their patients. They will also review APA’s newly updated Position Statement on the Role of Psychiatrists in Reducing Physical Health Disparities in Patients With Mental Illness and how it can help mental health professionals meet their patients’ whole-person needs.

  The chair will be Benjamin G. Druss, M.D., Professor and Rosalynn Carter Chair in Mental Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health. Presenters include Matthew Louis Goldman, M.D., medical director for Comprehensive Crisis Services in the San Francisco Department of Public Health and a volunteer clinical assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco; Joseph Parks, M.D., medical director of the National Council on Mental Wellbeing; and Lori Raney, M.D., a principal at Health Management Associates in Denver.

SMI Adviser is also sponsoring three sessions devoted to clinical issues regarding the use of clozapine (Psychiatric News).

SMI Adviser is funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. APA works closely on this project with a team of experts from 30 other mental health organizations. The team includes individuals, families, clinical experts, peers, and policymakers, all working to create access to the best resources on serious mental illness. ■