Behavioral Health and Public Health Integration - Public Health Essay Example

Behavioral health entails studying emotions and behaviors that are related to persons mental state including their functioning in the daily life. Behavioral health is a crucial form of health care at it greatly affects the persons spiritually, economically, socially and also physically. On the other hand, Public health is the science of ensuring safety and improving the health of people within the community through making policies, education and undertaking research on diseases as well as injuries prevention. Therefore, there is a need to integrate these two health sectors because they have very strong connection.

It has become easy to integrate behavioral health and public health since most of behavioral health issues needs public health approach. For instance, depression - one of behavioral health problem associated with mental illness- is recognized as a public health issue by the Disease Control and Prevention centers (USC, 2017). Also, suicide which results from mental illness can also be addressed through public health approach. Most of behavioral health issues are as a result of drugs and substance abuse. Therefore, through identification of risk factors by public health, there can be reduction of behavioral health related illness. Through integration of behavioral health and public health, awareness about mental disorders can be increased by public health agencies thus reducing the number of mental illness cases. Also, it is easy to use public health agencies to lead campaigns on mental health promotion as well as conduct research and surveillance that will help improve the basis of evidence on mental health in United States.

However, there has been a great challenge in collaborating primary health and behavioral health. This is basically because there has been no good model that has been developed to address the two simultaneously. Also, the fact that primary health care has different primary goals as compared to behavioral health clinic makes it hard to successfully integrate the two (Hall J, Cohen D, Davis M, Gunn R, Blount A, Pollack D & Miller B, 2015). Behavioral health is more specialized on analyzing vividly the patients behavior through counseling and interrogation whereas in primary health care, they are more concerned about clients history and symptoms without much counselling.

In conclusion, it is easy to integrate behavioral health with public health because they share a lot unlike primary health and behavioral health agencies which have many differences in how they care for their clients.

References

Hall J, Cohen D, Davis M, Gunn R, Blount A, Pollack D & Miller B. (2015). Preparing the Workforce for behavioral health and primary care integration. The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, S41-S51.

USC, K. S. (2017). Mental Illness and Public Health. Master of Public Health, 1-3.