Strategies to Mitigate the Rising Tide of Self-Medication in the US
Americans are increasingly self-medicating to cope with growing mental health challenges, which means healthcare organizations must work to improve access to professional help.
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By Anuja Vaidya
- The stress, anxiety, and isolation that come with living through an ongoing pandemic has taken its toll on the mental health of Americans, resulting in a dual healthcare crisis. To cope, a staggering number of U.S. adults are self-medicating.
Sierra Tucson, a mental health and addiction treatment facility based in Arizona, decided to gather survey data on self-medication to guide its efforts to mitigate the growing mental health epidemic in America.
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"The survey came out of just trying to assess how people were doing, especially in the addiction realm," said Jasleen Chhatwal, MD, chief medical officer at Sierra Tucson. "We did have some firsthand information about the fact that people were struggling more because they were working from home and isolated from their loved ones. And even when maybe the lockdowns ended, people were scared to go out and still did not have their normal coping mechanisms available to them. So, we wanted to try and get a sense of how people were coping, not really knowing what the answer was going to look like."
Of the 1,011 participants in the survey, 58.5 percent reported using alcohol during the pandemic, and 37.6 percent of them said that their alcohol use increased. About 21 percent of the survey participants reported using marijuana, of which 52 percent reported increased use during the pandemic.
While a smaller proportion of participants reported having used other recreational drugs (6.5 percent) during the pandemic, that population's use of alcohol and marijuana was notably high at 70 percent and 59 percent, respectively.
"We had expected that people were struggling to cope, so that wasn't maybe as much of a surprise, but the part that was more surprising was the ways in which they were doing it," Chhatwal said.
The survey also shows that people were using drugs and alcohol during the workday and possibly even when they had kids at home, she added.
To combat the issue, Chhatwal believes healthcare organizations need to continue efforts to reduce stigma surrounding mental healthcare, so individuals feel empowered to reach out to professionals to help them cope.
"We've been trying to do a lot where we host webinars almost every week to two weeks putting out information, [and] we've been doing social media campaigns to try and reduce stigma," she said.
In addition, organizations must continue to push for mental health and addiction treatment payment parity — that is, insurers covering behavioral and physical health benefits equally —particularly at the state level.
"Learning from the Parity and Addiction Equity Act that was passed in 2008, we know that you could pass the most beautiful thing at the federal level, but unless it's replicated at the state level and then rules are made at the state level in accordance, it just doesn't pan out as well as it could," Chhatwal said.
