The Keys to Better Mental Healthcare in 2025? Precision, Personalization, and Progress

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The Keys to Better Mental Healthcare in 2025? Precision, Personalization, and Progress

Our nation has been experiencing a mental health crisis for several years, marked by an alarming rise in mental illness that shows no signs of slowing down. 23% of adults experienced a mental illness in the past year, compared to 18% in 2008. 

Some good news is that mental health challenges are gradually becoming less stigmatized, empowering more individuals to seek help. In fact, the rate of adults who sought and received treatment increased from 19% in 2019 to 22% in 2023. However, up to 60% of people with mental health conditions do not respond to conventional treatments such as therapy or medications. This is a concerning figure.

All of this tells us that patients want help, but as a society, we aren’t always giving them the help they need. Something needs to change. And fast.

Psychiatry must move away from a one-size-fits-all approach. The numbers don’t lie. Instead, we need to shift toward exploring ways to enhance precision, which might include various personalization approaches, in order to accelerate progress. There was a time when mental illness treatment options for patients were very limited. But in recent years, technology has made incredible strides. We now have the ability to diagnose and treat with data-driven insights and deliver measurable outcomes. It’s on us as providers to ensure that we are consistently adopting the latest, proven technology and treatment modalities that can benefit our patients.

Precision and personalization

Depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States. When a patient receives a diagnosis of depression, they are often prescribed antidepressant medications, most commonly selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Providers have not always had tools that allow them to assess the efficacy of a particular antidepressant medication for that specific patient before prescribing it. However, advancements in medicine now enable us to be more precise and personalized in each patient’s care. 

Additionally, doctors can use measurement feedback systems to collect data on a patient’s progress during treatment using technology. Studies suggest that when doctors use this technology for patients with depression and anxiety, there may be potential benefits in the outcomes achieved from various different treatment modalities.

Future AI technologies may help clinicians by analyzing patterns in both patient data and published research to suggest potential treatment options. While still in development, such tools could one day support healthcare providers in making more personalized treatment decisions based on a broader analysis of clinical evidence.

More specific diagnoses and treatments are especially challenging without the identification of applicable biomarkers. But some progress has been made in this area as well. Researchers believe they have found a number of biomarkers for depression, including neurotransmitters, endocrine hormones, metabolic agents, and inflammatory substances. Certain biomarkers are believed to give us a deep look into the disease, such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor, cortisol, and serotonin. They can be detected through aptasensors and electrochemical immunosensors, (tools that recognize specific molecules).

When it comes to advancements in precise and personalized mental healthcare, these approaches are just scratching the surface. We now have opportunities to explore the potential adjustment of therapeutic modalities to align better with a patient’s individual learning style. There are apps available now to the public that allow users to track their moods and select meditations based on their levels of stress. Researchers are now studying the potential use of biofeedback as a complementary treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients to observe their changes in heart rate and then learn relaxation techniques. The opportunities are endless. 

With such data and insights, researchers hope to expand the number of tools that may become available to more effectively diagnose and prescribe treatments. This all advances the goal of enhancing precision and tailoring personalized treatments to provide our patients with more relief and better outcomes.

Progress

In addition to technologies that can significantly improve the way we diagnose and treat mental illness, we need to look at progress in treatments themselves. It’s easiest to order medications that we have been prescribing for years. But with so many patients failing these modalities, we need to look at more data and other effective treatment options.

With the significant number of patients who do not respond to medications, many are left feeling hopeless. For too many, their story does not end well. For some “luckier” ones, they or their loved ones somehow find the energy to continue to push themselves to find a solution that will work – sometimes after decades of trying and failing on prescription drugs. 

Today, approximately one in ten Americans, ages 12 and older, take an antidepressant medication. Yet, unfortunately, we have seen significant rises in mental illness rates. It is our duty to give our patients a better future with treatments that may work better for them.

As an industry, we need to make sure that we continue to evolve these technologies to make it seamless and easy for doctors to adopt. As doctors, we need to adapt and adopt, always keeping an eye out for the latest technologies and treatments that may benefit our patients. That is our obligation to them.

Picture: Benjavisa, Getty Images


Richard A. Bermudes, MD, is a distinguished psychiatrist and the Chief Medical Officer of BrainsWay. BrainsWay is a global leader in advanced noninvasive neurostimulation treatments for mental health disorders. BrainsWay’s proprietary Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (Deep TMS) platform technology is FDA-cleared to treat major depressive disorder (including reduction of anxiety symptoms, commonly referred to as anxious depression), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and smoking addiction.

Dr. Bermudes is the founder and president of Empathy MindCare, a healthcare organization that integrates rapid-acting treatments like Deep TMS and Ketamine with evidence-based psychotherapies to address mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction. Additionally, he founded Empathy Minded, an education technology platform dedicated to advancing mental health care through education, community, and support. He is the lead editor of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Second Edition.

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