Over the years, many health care providers have separated how we attend to the mind and the body. We’ve said, “If you have a physical problem, you go to one kind of caregiver for treatment. If you have a mental health problem, you go to another kind of caregiver.”

In 2015, more of us are aware of the interplay between mental health and physical health. For example, if someone is diabetic and actively depressed, they often have trouble managing their diabetes. It’s common for anxiety to adversely affect a person’s heart condition. Children may go to a pediatrician with somatic symptoms – stomach problems or headaches – when their parents are going through a divorce. Many issues are interconnected.

Integrating behavioral health into primary care simply brings the body and the mind back together. By demonstrating that primary care is the right place to provide both mental and physical health care, we help remove the stigma of mental health issues. Behavioral health integration into primary care enables us to treat the whole person in one place.

One patient’s story helps to illustrate the impact that integrating behavioral health into primary care can have on people’s lives. A gentleman in his late 40s, who’d had a tough childhood and early adulthood, had been in a gang fight that left him with years of chronic pain. Over time, his medical provider gave him different treatments, including opiates and physical therapy, and many of these treatments didn’t have much effect. His chronic pain was escalating and he was coming to the provider’s office in tears. Feeling as though he had tried everything else, the medical provider asked a behaviorist to do an assessment.

The behaviorist discovered that this man had an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and was getting up 50 to 60 times a night to check locks. This behavior worsened when his stress increased and his sleep deprivation, of course, aggravated his stress and his pain. The OCD had been untreated his whole life.

Once this gentleman got on the right antidepressant and received behavioral support, his pain decreased dramatically. He started sleeping again. He said he had never felt so good in his life. The medical provider could have just provided more medication, more x-rays, or more lab tests. Instead, he called upon his behavioral health colleague for assistance and together they helped alleviate years of suffering.

As we begin to move away from fee-for-service models and the pressure increases to improve outcomes while reducing costs, it is important to remember that an estimated minimum of 50 percent of primary care visits have a behavioral health component. These range from mental health diagnoses to the behavioral changes necessary for everything from medication adherence to starting an exercise regimen. Developing effective, team-based, fully-integrated primary care has never been more important for both patients and providers.

By demonstrating that primary care is the right place to provide both mental and physical health care, we help remove the stigma of mental health issues and can treat the whole person in one place. In this blog post, Wendy Bradley describes how integrating behavioral health and primary care helped to unravel the mystery of a patient’s years of chronic pain. She is a faculty expert for IHI’s Web&ACTION: Behavioral Health Integration: A Key Step Toward the Triple Aim.