If everyone is moving forward together then success takes care itself - Henry Ford
Collaborative Mental Health Care models are fast becoming the need of the hour. Kates, N. et. al. (2011) in their study of the Canadian Collaborative Mental Health Care (CMHC) systems state that CMHC encompasses a range of team-based interventions promoting greater mutual support between providers from different specialities, disciplines and sectors and more coordinated, complementary services to clients which come in with varied mental health concerns.
To provide the most comprehensive and coordinated care possible, it is critical for all mental health services to be well linked to and collaboratively involved in multidisciplinary networks. Therapists, therapeutic caseworkers, counsellors, physicians, educators and other mental health professionals are better able to address people's needs and ensure therapeutic success toward defined recovery outcomes as they exchange perspectives and responsibilities. Collaboration can involve better communication, closer personal contacts, sharing of care time, joint educational or remedial programs and/or joint planning.
It is recommended that parents, clinicians, and educators each have a unique and relevant viewpoint on the aims of the child's treatment and various psychosocial strategies for dealing with the child while determining the parameters of the supportive partnership. This means that keeping all viewpoints is beneficial. That also means that if one partner ceded her interests and accepted those of another—for example, if the teacher adopted the parent's goals or the parent adopted the therapist's—the partnership would experience some damage. This is referred to as co-optation. Here are some instances where co-optation might happen in a collaborative mental health care team :
The most prevalent method of co-optation happens when parents adopt a therapist's therapy advice, as a rule, relinquishing power over their children's treatment. Parents, for example, may follow a pharmacotherapist's recommendation for an effective medicine for their child despite what they see as a negative impact on the child's and family's well-being. The reverse may also happen, where a pharmacotherapist agrees to a parent's request for drug-based treatment of a particular series of symptoms, even though the pharmacotherapist believes the medicine is ineffective.
Teachers being the next important figure also regard special education and general education as non-exclusive categories that can be mixed in various ways to better represent an individual's interests. They shape their views on a child's possible prospects of social and academic achievement in general based on their interactions with other children and first-hand awareness of classroom realities in a classroom for schooling. A child's academic location has a significant impact on the child's daily life, effectively changing both the challenges of psychotherapeutic / psychopharmacological care and the domain in which such treatments occur. Whereas a parent or teacher may see a child's therapy as influencing his academic performance.
Webster defines the word ‘Synergy’ as mutually advantageous conjunction or compatibility of distinct participants or elements (such as resources or efforts). The idea of collaboration amongst all allied professionals is to offer a more comprehensive and holistic service that is customized appropriately keeping in mind the client’s mental health concerns. The client, therefore, remains at the center of this entire process rather than the individual ideas of each of the allied professionals.
Therefore Interventions will be considered as collaborative care if they fulfil these criteria:
Criteria I: A multidisciplinary team involving a primary care practitioner and at least one other allied professional (eg. school counselor, psychologist, psychiatrist, special educator et.al.)
Criteria II: A structured mental health plan (eg. use of a structured document like an Individualised Education Plan (IEP) or a counselling plan, evidence-based pharmacotherapy or psychotherapy)
Criteria III: A systematic or scheduled approach for follow-up
Criteria IV: Suitable and mutually decided process for regular communication between all the stakeholders including the parents (eg. team meetings, shared documents about the client's history/medical records, consultation, therapy progress, minutes of the meetings etc).
Most importantly, remember that everyone's presence in the collaboration must be valued and as they say - if you want to be exponentially better, be collaborative, not co-adaptive.
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