Mental Health Consulting

The Model

Consider a relationship-based mental health model that integrates orthomolecular (holistic) psychiatry into a comprehensive treatment plan designed to treat the cause of mental illness. This model is based on functional medicine which seeks to treat the causes instead of symptoms of illnesses. Functional medicine is grounded in the following principles:1]

• Biochemical individuality
• Patient-centered medicine
• Dynamic balance
• Health as a positive vitality
• Promotion of organ reserve

More than complimentary alternative medicine, holistic psychiatry is science-based medicine that creates a strong foundation of emotional, spiritual and physical treatment plans that produce outcome data designed to measure the effectiveness of treatment.

I believe analyzing such outcome data will minimize the cyclical patterns of treatment-recovery-regression-treatment that is the current medical model used in mental health. Without effective outcome data, consumers and providers are not held accountable to recovery plans; neither party can properly know what is working and what is not working – so, a provider may continue treating a consumer for years (and typically does) without any data to support the effectiveness of the treatment. Such models encourage consumer dependency on treatment and providers (thus feeding the cyclical nature as earlier stated), rather than support independency, accountability and participation.