APA Fellows to Lead IPS Series on Mental Health Disparities

APA’s Division of Diversity and Health Equity (DDHE) will focus on a range of topics aiming to improve services to vulnerable populations and cultural competence skills at this year’s IPS: The Mental Health Services Conference.

“All sessions will be presented by APA fellows and will serve as a vehicle for better understanding cultural issues in clinical practice,” said DDHE Director Ranna Parekh, M.D., M.P.H.

The series is a part of the DDHE mental health disparities education program and will begin on Thursday, October 6, with the workshop “Transition Out of Foster Care: Mental Health Needs of a High-Risk Population.” It will be chaired by Megan Baker, M.D., an APA Public Psychiatry Fellow and a fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine.

“The purpose of this workshop is to present a clinically relevant overview of transition-age foster youth and their mental health needs, as well as discuss the impact of trauma [at a young age] and adolescent brain development,” Baker told Psychiatric News. “As psychiatrists, we are in a unique position to support their transition to adulthood and mitigate some of the poor outcomes seen in this population.”

Thursday’s schedule will also include a workshop on structural competency, which is the ability to discern how a host of issues defined clinically as symptoms, attitudes, or diseases can be the result of deeply ingrained societal problems (termed “structural violence”) such as institutionalized racism and sexism. Presenters will give a rationale for including structural competency training in medical education, particularly that of psychiatry residents and fellows, and provide approaches to integrating such training into all stages of medical education. They will also provide language for collaborating with patients and the community in addressing structural violence.

Friday, October 7, will open with a discussion relating to human sex trafficking—the nature and complexity of the sex industry and ways that psychiatrists can engage victims to enter psychiatric care.

“The rates of mental health problems in individuals who have had involvement in the sex industry is high, with rates of depression reportedly ranging from 20 percent to 90 percent,” said Rachel Robitz, M.D., an APA Public Psychiatry Fellow and the chief residency fellow of medicine and psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

Robitz, who is also the chair of the workshop “Overcoming Barriers to Care and Challenges in Treatment of Clients Involved in the North American Sex Industry,” told Psychiatric News that there is a dearth of information on mental health interventions for those involved in the sex industry, making it difficult for psychiatrists to find ways to best serve or even recognize those who are victimized. To help fill this void, the workshop will include presentations by experts who have studied this population and provided care to sex workers, in addition to a presentation by a patient who was once involved in the sex industry.

The series will conclude on Sunday, October 9, with a session explaining value-based payment under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) and a session on how the New York Health and Hospitals Corporation transformed the delivery of psychiatric care via the Lean Methodology. This strategy was originally conceptualized by the Toyota Motor Corporation to maximize customer value with fewer resources. ■

Dates, times, and locations of the DDHE workshops will be published in the IPS program distributed on site at the meeting as well as in the Meetings App. Instructions on downloading the app will appear in the program.