How Families Navigate The Mental Healthcare System to Get Quality Care for a Loved One [Episode 1]

Family Psych Consumer

Tom O'Connor, the host of Family Psych Consumer, welcomes his listeners to his podcast community – and walks you through why Family Psych Consumer is providing consumer reporting in mental healthcare NOW and how his content helps parents and families understand the mental healthcare marketplace. Tom takes time to discuss tells his own story as a professional in the mental health care marketplace and his unique perspective as an advisor to parents and families around the US.

Tom goes into detail explaining what most listeners experience in their day-to-day life – that they are subject experts on the mental health and disabilities of their loved ones who become patients in the mental health care system. And those parents and family caregivers are marginalized as stakeholders in the treatment decisions and treatment planning for their loved one.

In a deeper dive, Tom reviews how psychiatry and mental health care do little to explain to its customers and prospective patients how to understand it, assess it, purchase it or judge its quality. So parents and families are left to guess about a medical service that is highly variable in quality and highly instrumental in the mental welfare of a loved one. He concludes with his vision for a more robust and effective mental health care delivery system designed around caregivers.