The past few months have continued the complex changes occurring in health care nationally, with more information about the Affordable Care Act, Accountable Care organizations and Integrated Care, DSM V and Oh, those new CPT codes. I have shifted my practice from a community mental health organization to my group and home practices for the time being while I attempt to catch up from the health effects of working too hard for too long while transitioning in every area of my personal life. As you can imagine, this shift has put me indirect contact with each of the aforementioned changes. I find myself contemplating balance billing and getting off insurance panels, or simply going underground…
The alternative as I see it, is to work to spread the work of our membership. We (I am taking an editorial liberty here) see family and systems orientations as fundamental to the practice of psychiatry. Several recent interactions give me hope in knowing that there are several islands on which one can take shelter in this storm.
- Conversations related to the upcoming AACAP Family Institute (see below) have ranged into finding a new name that encompasses the fundamental nature of this perspective (comprehensive biological psychiatry, relational psychiatry, family/systems, family/contextual, ecosystemic, family social/systems, family and attachment psychiatry). How do we communicate what we know and do? Join the team or at least come to the Institute next year!
- A couple of weeks ago, I attended a training with Harville Hendrix in which he shared his growing conviction that all healing occurs in the “space between” people, that all illness and all healing, by extension, are relational. He has formed Couples Educational Think Tank to promote these principles. click here for more info
- Related to this is the abstract below on enactivism, a branch of cognitive science that ‘suggests that “we become part of each other’s brain-body-world systems;”that we co-enact a world; that reality is, for each of us, a joint project…. Meaning is made, and so therapeutic action only becomes possible, in-between persons rather than inside them.
Gwyn M Cattell MD
