Preventative Mental Health Care: an Emergent Model.

Though cultural attitudes towards seeking mental health treatment are evolving, many people still experience significant barriers when addressing underlying cause of mental illness. Furthermore, existing models of treatment fall short in addressing the larger socio-economic, cultural, and institutional barriers facing communities.

These realities pose significant challenges in the development of new models of preventative healthcare. What the COVID-19 pandemic made abundantly clear to the world is that our existing Western healthcare infrastructure is insufficient.

According to one article from Brown University, incident rates of depression tripled during the early months of the pandemic. Similar trends were also observed in communities when looking at levels of anxiety, suicide, and substance abuse. Anecdotally, mental health service providers report that stress is at an all time high and does not seem to be returning to pre-pandemic levels despite the relative decline in risk associated with contraction of the novel coronavirus.

The bottom line? People were stressed out before COVID-19, it got worse during the pandemic, and now our collective is grappling with significant levels of unresolved grief and trauma. We are also facing a unique confluence of complex and interdependent challenges across socio-economic, racial, environmental, and political arenas.

It is widely understood that over 95% of all disease is attributable to stress and inflammation in the body. This is true for everything from the common cold, to autoimmune disorders. While genetics factors may load an individual's predisposition for a particular disease, environmental stress is the trigger for the epigenetic expression of that illness.

In order to address the underlying cause of disease, we must begin to develop new models of preventative care which support stress reduction and bio-physiological relaxation as their explicit aim.

Not only must we address chronic stress and burnout culturally, but we must begin to systematically empower individuals with the skills they need to shift out of a stress-response and into a coherent state in a way that is both culturally informed and trauma-responsive.

At Quantum Clinic we are doing just that. By pioneering a model of preventative care developed in direct response to the overmedicalization (overdiagnosis and overtreatment) and iatrogenic harm that so many people experience in the prevailing healthcare system.

We have combined evidence-based treatments, which include biofeedback training, floatation REST, and frequency therapy to facilitate a deeply relaxing and restorative experience. Essentially flipping the script on the prevailing bias towards cognitive approaches to stress reduction by empowering individuals to activate their own potential for epigenetic healing through coherence practice.

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