Underserved Population

The purpose of writing these blog posts is to spread the news about developing this book. These blogs will hint about what will eventually be self-published. In my first post, I began to describe my work as a mobile psychiatric emergency clinician. I will expand on this a bit.

The majority of clinical cases at my current place of employment have involved mentally high-functioning patients. However, I have felt most satisfied when working on the most complicated, most acute cases involving the most mentally impaired patients. My fascination with this population relates to how grossly underserved they are both in the mental health system and the legal system. This subset of the mentally ill population is more impaired than higher functioning subsets. Therefore, it's ironic that they don't appear to be prioritized by many societal entities.

I became alarmed at the extremely high rates of readmissions to the inpatient psychiatric units that I worked on. While emergency work has involved observing patients functioning outside of hospitals for many years, this has sometimes felt like long-term care because of the astronomically high rate of patients returning to the emergency setting.