348 - Mental Health Before, During and After the Pandemic
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The pandemic has caused trauma, grief, and stress leading to depression, anxiety, and worsening of other mental health conditions. Dr. Adam Karpati, former executive deputy commissioner for mental hygiene at the New York City Health Department and currently the Senior Vice President of Public Health Programs at Vital Strategies, talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the profound mental health impact of the pandemic, in the context of prior failures to support people with mental illness. Dr. Karpati sets out a vision for a more organized, caring, and effective system of mental health care.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City. |
| 0:20.0 | Our goal is to bring |
| 0:21.7 | scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews |
| 0:27.1 | with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. |
| 0:32.8 | If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:40.4 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.4 | Today, our topic is mental health. Not just the impact of the pandemic on any one of us, |
| 0:52.1 | but the impact of the pandemic on all of us. I'm speaking with |
| 0:55.7 | Dr. Adam Carpati, the former executive deputy commissioner for mental hygiene at the New York |
| 1:01.1 | City Health Department. He's now the senior vice president at Vital Strategies. Let's listen. |
| 1:07.5 | Adam Carpati, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. This has been an incredibly stressful |
| 1:13.3 | period for so many people directly and indirectly dealing with the consequences of the pandemic. |
| 1:19.9 | What does it all add up to in terms of the mental health challenges that we're facing? |
| 1:24.3 | Thanks very much for having me. I think the first thing to think about is that |
| 1:28.4 | before the pandemic, mental health and mental illness was and continues to be a major public |
| 1:35.0 | health challenge in the country. And a few points to make about this. First, mental illness is |
| 1:40.9 | incredibly common. And I think that when we think about ourselves and our families and our communities, we recognize this intuitively. |
| 1:48.6 | We know the burden of poor mental health. |
| 1:51.4 | But just a few numbers on that, in any given year, something like one in five to one in four adults will report symptoms consistent with the mental illness. |
| 2:02.6 | The most common ones, of course, are depression and anxiety disorders. |
| 2:07.3 | So before the pandemic, mental illness was common. |
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