What Are the Common Barriers to Psychiatric Care, according to Damian Jacob Sendler
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: The biggest problem is generally the cost of treatment, lack of appropriate coverage through an employer or third party providers, and the general lack of knowledge about who needs to receive specialized care. The other significant factor is social stigmatization that does not allow specific individuals to pursue the treatments that they need because they fear that the people that live in their immediate vicinity be it their family, friends or neighbors are going to pinpoint that they have a specific issue that they should be ashamed of.
Another common issue is the availability of specialized psychiatric services either because someone lives in a place that doesn’t have any mental health facility available nearby. Or there is a barrier to transportation which can affect people living in big cities. Back in the days, a lot of mental health institutions were built on the outskirts of the town. So transportation is undoubtedly one of those barriers that affect many of the urban living individuals.
What Kinds of Things Do Researchers Typically Explore in Psychiatric Research?
Damian Jacob Sendler: There is such an incredible breadth of research topics that psychiatric researchers explore that you can’t capture it in a single sentence or even paragraph or even a book. People have so many different focuses, and that is such an exciting time to live in as a scientist because you can learn from all of these different individuals.
One area that I have explored in the past included neuroimaging, which is undoubtedly one of the most exciting and fascinating areas of research, as it directly looks at how the brain works in the context of different stimuli. Another exciting city that I got to explore in the past included neurobiology, which looks at how the biochemistry of the brain influences specific behaviors.
Read now: What is digital epidemiology and how it may be applied in psychiatric research.
In my research practice, I utilize tools of digital epidemiology and surveys to look at what kind of problems people are dealing with. So I think that there are a lot of different exciting approaches. Each one is unique and advantageous, depending on the specific questions that the researchers are trying to address through research.
What Are the Typical Barriers to Conducting Psychiatric Research?
Damian Jacob Sendler : The biggest problem is financial as certain studies cost more to conduct with specific populations of individuals. Another big problem is gaining trust and recruiting people for these kinds of studies. Another big category of the issues influencing psychiatric research is that we may not have adequate tools or understanding of specific topics that we attempt to scrutinize. For instance, that is especially relevant in neuropsychiatric research, where there are various attempts to understand how specific psychiatric phenomena like fear or post-traumatic stress impact mental well being of people who experienced those psychiatric distresses. Typically the first step in developing good neuropsychiatric approaches to study these phenomena is to develop an animal model in a biology research laboratory and then see if that can be extended into neurobiological imaging on humans. So as you can imagine there are a lot of technical problems, and a lot of ethical issues around those types of research projects
Does Every Research Project Need Financial Sponsoring?
Damian Jacob Sendler: Not all the research projects require sponsoring as if you are conducting surveys as I do, the cost is pretty minimal. What determines the price of research is if you need to have people on your team to help you research because they either can help in recruiting individuals for research studies or have specific skills that can be helpful and data analysis. The more complex the research protocol is, the more expensive the investigation becomes. And thankfully, not all the research studies require comprehensive and complicated methodological approaches.
Read on: Did you know that Twitter may be used in psychiatric research? While there’s always some bias in this type of data collection, there are benefits as well.
For example, if you’re like me and you study how digital technologies impact the mental health of everyday people, simple surveys can often suffice to conduct those studies, or if you are looking at how people exchange information on the digital platforms, you can undoubtedly use digital ethnography approaches to do that. Those types of research studies are not expensive to conduct, either.
