Mary Durham

Burden of illness.

The burden of affective disorders includes costs and the pain and suffering of affected individuls. Burden can be perceived from social and private perspectives. Although no ideal measure of burden exists, ample evidence documents the extensive cost and other negative impacts of affective disorders. Affective disorders are associated with disruptive family relations, higher health care costs for comorbid conditions, elevated rates of suicide, and lower productivity. Reserch should focus on improving measures of burden in general and on quantifying burden from the standpoint of diverse population groups.

Overcoming barriers to reducing the burden of affective disorders

Affective disorders impose a substantial individual and societal burden. Despite availability of efficacious treatments and practice guidelines, unmet need remains high. To reduce unmet need and the burden of affective disorders, information is needed on the distribution of burden across stakeholders, on barriers to reducing burden, and on interventions that effectively reduce burden at the levels of practice, community, and policy. This article provides the report of the Working Group on Overcoming Barriers to Reducing the Burden of Affective Disorders, for the National Institute of Mental Health Strategic Plan on Mood Disorders. We review the literature, identify key gaps, and recommend new research to guide national efforts to reduce the burden of affective disorders.

Work–Family Balance Issues and Work–Leave Policies

Unhealthy work environments are not only the consequence of physical characteristics. Psychosocial aspects of the environment, including control and social support, are also consequential factors. While holding multiple roles as both worker and family member can have positive implications for health, chronic stress experienced from lack of work–family balance has negative effects. This chapter describes an interdisciplinary model of how work–family strains impact the health and well being of employees, their families, and the organizations in which they work. We argue that both structure and culture count at the workplace: work–family conflict increases with both a lack of supervisor support for family obligations and ineffective workplace policies and programs regarding employees’ control over the time and timing of work. We then describe an ongoing randomized field experiment to implement and evaluate a workplace-based prevention program to improve work–family balance. We conclude with the implications of this model for future research.

Developing a data infrastructure for a learning health system: the PORTAL network

The Kaiser Permanente & Strategic Partners Patient Outcomes Research To Advance Learning (PORTAL) network engages four healthcare delivery systems (Kaiser Permanente, Group Health Cooperative, HealthPartners, and Denver Health) and their affiliated research centers to create a new national network infrastructure that builds on existing relationships among these institutions. PORTAL is enhancing its current capabilities by expanding the scope of the common data model, paying particular attention to incorporating patient-reported data more systematically, implementing new multi-site data governance procedures, and integrating the PCORnet PopMedNet platform across our research centers. PORTAL is partnering with clinical research and patient experts to create cohorts of patients with a common diagnosis (colorectal cancer), a rare diagnosis (adolescents and adults with severe congenital heart disease), and adults who are overweight or obese, including those with pre-diabetes or diabetes, to conduct large-scale observational comparative effectiveness research and pragmatic clinical trials across diverse clinical care settings.

Community-based interventions.

This paper explores the potential of community-based, public health-oriented interventions as a tool for reducing the burden of affective disorders on individuals, their families, and communities. The paper reviews the use of community-based interventions with other health-related problems and describes potential applicability for affective disorders such as changing public attitudes, reducing social stigma, facilitating access, or supporting treatment adherence for populations in their community settings. An agenda for developing this field of intervention research is proposed.

Work-family conflict, cardiometabolic risk, and sleep duration in nursing employees

We investigated associations of work-family conflict and work and family conditions with objectively measured cardiometabolic risk and sleep. Multilevel analyses assessed cross-sectional associations between employee and job characteristics and health in analyses of 1,524 employees in 30 extended-care facilities in a single company. We examined work and family conditions in relation to: (a) validated, cardiometabolic risk score based on measured blood pressure, cholesterol, glycosylated hemoglobin, body mass index, and self-reported tobacco consumption and (b) wrist actigraphy-based sleep duration. In fully adjusted multilevel models, work-to-family conflict but not family-to-work conflict was positively associated with cardiometabolic risk. Having a lower level occupation (nursing assistant vs. nurse) was associated with increased cardiometabolic risk, whereas being married and having younger children at home was protective. A significant Age × Work-to-Family Conflict interaction revealed that higher work-to-family conflict was more strongly associated with increased cardiometabolic risk in younger employees. High family-to-work conflict was significantly associated with shorter sleep duration. Working long hours and having children at home were both independently associated with shorter sleep duration. High work-to-family conflict was associated with longer sleep duration. These results indicate that different dimensions of work-family conflict may pose threats to cardiometabolic health and sleep duration for employees. This study contributes to the research on work-family conflict, suggesting that work-to-family and family-to-work conflict are associated with specific health outcomes. Translating theory and findings to preventive interventions entails recognition of the dimensionality of work and family dynamics and the need to target specific work and family conditions.

Practice-based interventions.

Current evidence indicates there remains a large gap in the provision of depression care, particularly in primary care. Several studies have demonstrated that interventions based on the chronic disease management model can improve patient outcomes. Challenges include designing more robust interventions that can move easily into a wide variety of primary care organizations. More research is needed to develop programs to improve outcomes for children with depression and adults with bipolar disorders.

Children and adolescents.

Until the 2001 Surgeon Generals report there had been no acknowledgment of the need for a national plan for research priorities to improve services and reduce illness burden for children and adolescents with severe mental disorders. Barriers to services among those in need include individual and family factors, and clinician and service system factors. Additionally, little reserch is available on the impact of major policy reforms on childrens ability to obtain efficacious care. Critical research gaps exist in a number of areas with the prevention and early intervention area representing a particularly important missed opportunity.

Research on reducing burden of affective disorders for special populations: introduction and general recommendation.

Populations should be prioritzed for research on reducing the burden of affective disorders based on expected or known burden or current level of unmet need for care. We recommend a focus on ethnic minorities, impoverished women, children, adolescents, and individuals with bipolar illness. Studying effectiveness of interventions and the efficiency of delivery systems are priorities for special popultions.

Research Development Mechanisms

Studies designed to reduce the burden of affective disorders should apply and develop theories and methods from diverse social sciences that could strengthen current interventions. A series of papers from diverse fields, such as quality engineering, behavioral economics, etc. might be a needed first step. Methodological research on design strategies such as group-level randomized trials, or instrumental variables analyses are needed. Finaly, qualitative studies to understand diverse stakeholder views are also needed. To pursue these areas, interdisciplinary training programs are needed to develop skilled researchers to study communities and community- based delivery settings. New research infrastructures are needed to support community and research collaborations, as well as supporting development of new technologies to enable diffusion of care.