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32–402 PDF 2007

S. HRG. 109–779

A GENERATION AT RISK: BREAKING THE CYCLE

OF SENIOR SUICIDE

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON AGING 

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

WASHINGTON, DC

SEPTEMBER 14, 2006

Serial No. 109–32

Printed for the use of the Special Committee on Aging

(

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON AGING 

GORDON SMITH, Oregon, Chairman 

RICHARD SHELBY, Alabama 

SUSAN COLLINS, Maine 

JAMES M. TALENT, Missouri 

ELIZABETH DOLE, North Carolina 

MEL MARTINEZ, Florida 

LARRY E. CRAIG, Idaho 

RICK SANTORUM, Pennsylvania 

CONRAD BURNS, Montana 

LAMAR ALEXANDER, Tennessee 

JIM DEMINT, South Carolina 

HERB KOHL, Wisconsin 

JAMES M. JEFFORDS, Vermont 

RON WYDEN, Oregon 

BLANCHE L. LINCOLN, Arkansas 

EVAN BAYH, Indiana 

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware 

BILL NELSON, Florida 

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, New York 

KEN SALAZAR, Colorado 

CATHERINE FINLEY, Staff Director 

JULIE COHEN, Ranking Member Staff Director 

(II) 

C O N T E N T S 

Page 

Opening Statement of Senator Gordon Smith ....................................................... 1

Opening Statement of Senator Herb Kohl ............................................................. 3

PANEL I 

David Carl Steffens, M.D., M.H.S., professor of Psychiatry and Medicine, 

and head, Division of Geriatric Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC .................................................................................................. 4

PANEL II 

Christopher C. Colenda, M.D., M.P.H., The Jean and Thomas McMullin Dean 

of Medicine, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, and president, 

American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry .................................................. 44

Melvin Kohn, M.D., M.P.H., State Epidemiologist, Public Health Division, 

Oregon Department of Human Services, Salem, OR ........................................ 54

Art Walaszek, M.D., assistant professor of Psychiatry and director of Psychiatry Residency Training, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and 

Public Health, Madison, WI ................................................................................ 59

David Shern, president and chief executive officer, National Mental Health 

Association, Alexandria, VA ................................................................................ 65

APPENDIX 

Prepared Statement of Senator Ken Salazar ........................................................ 77

(III) 

(1)

A GENERATION AT RISK: BREAKING THE 

CYCLE OF SENIOR SUICIDE 

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2006 

U.S. SENATE, 

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON AGING, 

Washington, DC. 

The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:02 a.m., in room 

SD–562, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Gordon H. Smith 

(chairman of the committee) presiding. 

Present: Senators Smith and Kohl. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR GORDON H. SMITH, 

CHAIRMAN 

The CHAIRMAN. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank 

you for your attendance here at this Committee hearing of the Senate Special Committee on Aging. This is a topic that tugs at the 

heart strings, but is very important. We have entitled it ‘‘A Generation at Risk: Breaking the Cycle of Senior Suicide.’’ 

Today’s hearing focuses on an issue that is of particular importance to me, that of mental illness and suicide prevention. Since 

suffering a family tragedy, I have felt a personal call to action to 

shed light on the struggle of millions of Americans coping with a 

mental illness. As my wife and I became involved in the issue of 

suicide prevention, we were overwhelmed by personal stories of 

those battling mental illness. Sharon and I now share in a fraternity of sorrow with those who have lost loved ones to this killer. 

Though it is not a common perception, seniors are at a much 

higher risk for suicide than those of other age groups. While those 

over the age of 65 account for only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 20 percent of the Nation’s suicides. The 

problem only worsens with age. Compared with suicide rates of 

younger men, suicide rates of men over the age of 85 are two to 

three times higher. Statistics such as these are alarming, and that 

is why this hearing is so important. It is critical that we raise public awareness of this issue and discuss ways to reduce these startling and tragic statistics. 

Suicide across the age spectrum is becoming an epidemic. There 

is work being done at the Federal level, but we still have a very 

long way to go. The Aging Committee has served as a forum to examine the needs of seniors, all kinds of needs, and to highlight better ways to serve them. This Committee was the first to bring this 

important issue to light with a hearing in 1996, and I hope today’s 

work will serve as a call to action. 

2

It is a sad irony that as medical technology evolves to extend 

lives, seniors are choosing to end theirs. Retirement should be a 

time to relax, travel, and spend time with grandchildren. Unfortunately, seniors often are exposed to circumstances that can lead to 

depression, such as social isolation, physical illness, and the death 

of loved ones. I think it is very important that we understand that 

depression is neither a weakness nor a normal part of aging. Depression at any age is a very real disease. No one should suffer in 

silence. 

What many fail to realize is that suicide is entirely preventable. 

The senior population, however, presents unique challenges. As a 

generation, seniors are less likely to talk about their symptoms or 

to seek help. More than any age group, seniors suffer from the stigma associated with mental illness, and many are unaware of or are 

too ashamed to pursue treatment options. 

Fortunately, there are ways to help seniors in dealing with these 

issues. Studies show that 77 percent of seniors saw their primary 

care physician within one year of their suicide and 58 percent saw 

their primary care physician within one month. Clearly, the primary care setting is the critical component of suicide prevention 

and intervention. 

This hearing will examine the quality of mental health care 

given to seniors and will look for ways to improve upon the ability 

of primary care doctors to recognize the signs of depression among 

their senior patients. Today, we will hear the results of a groundbreaking study that demonstrates the effectiveness of serving the 

mental health needs of seniors in a primary care setting. 

As one of Oregon’s Senators, I am very pleased that my home 

State has a particularly innovative model of suicide prevention. It 

has this, I suppose, in spite of and maybe because of the assisted 

suicide law in our State. It is the only State to implement a comprehensive suicide prevention plan for seniors. I am looking forward to learning more about their efforts today and those of several other experts in the field of suicide prevention. It is a pleasure 

to have all of you here and I truly appreciate your sharing your experiences with us today. 

There is a vote scheduled at 11, so we are going to try to be expeditious and give sufficient time to each of our witnesses. What you 

have prepared to share is important to us and will help us better 

understand how we in the Federal Government can help you to 

prevent suicide among seniors and among all people. 

With that, I turn to my colleague, Senator Kohl, for his opening 

remarks.

3

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HERB KOHL 

Senator KOHL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this important hearing. We all admire your steadfast leadership and commitment to helping our Nation’s families prevent tragic cases of suicide. We look forward to today’s discussion of how to make sure 

seniors who suffer from depression find the help that they need. 

Our Nation is slowly making progress in removing the stigma of 

mental illness, but today too many seniors still fall prey to depression. Some are ashamed, some believe it is just a fact of life in old 

age, and some don’t know where to turn for help. In fact, a survey 

of seniors found that only 38 percent believe depression is a health 

problem and more than half responded that it was just a normal 

part of aging. But depression, as we all know, is not a normal part 

of aging and it is treatable. Yet, too often seniors are left untreated 

and suicidal. 

Seniors make up 13 percent of our population, but account for 

close to 20 percent of all suicides. In fact, 75 percent of older people 

who commit suicide have seen their primary care doctor within the 

last month of their lives, as our Chairman has pointed out, and our 

health care system has failed them. So we must do more. 

Doctors must be trained to recognize and respond when their 

senior patients are depressed. We also need more geriatric specialists to manage the care of older patients who face multiple health 

problems. Today, there are only 5 geriatricians and 1.4 geriatric 

psychiatrists for every 10,000 seniors. We have pushed for funding 

for the Federal geriatrician training program to address these 

shortages and we hope that that program will be restored. 

As the Nation prepares for the retirement wave of 77 million 

baby-boomers, we need to rethink the way mental health care is 

provided to seniors. Today, we will hear from two panels of distinguished experts who will explain the problem of senior suicide and 

suggest creative models to prevent it. I am very pleased that Dr. 

Art Walaszek, a leader in this field in Wisconsin, is here to share 

his experience and his work. 

Again, we thank you, Senator Smith, for organizing this hearing. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Senator Kohl. 

Our first panel consists of Dr. David Steffens. He is a professor 

of psychiatry and medicine, and head of the Division of Geriatric 

Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Steffens is also 

a chief investigator on the IMPACT study and will discuss publicly 

the findings of this ground-breaking study today. 

Thank you for coming, Dr. Steffens.

4

STATEMENT OF DAVID CARL STEFFENS, M.D., M.H.S., PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY AND MEDICINE, AND HEAD, DIVISION OF GERIATRIC PSYCHIATRY, DUKE UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER, DURHAM, NC 

Dr. STEFFENS. Senator Smith and Senator Kohl, I want to thank 

you for inviting me to give testimony about suicide, an important 

public health matter that affects Americans across the age spectrum, but as we have heard, has a disproportionate effect on older 

Americans. 

As a geriatric psychiatrist, when I look at the CDC statistics, the 

take-home message for me is the alarming suicide rate for white 

men 85 and over. The large majority of these victims used a firearm to kill themselves. I want to shift my testimony, however, in 

a positive direction and talk about solutions. Both the NIH and private foundations are helping to develop an evidence base for prevention of suicide in older adults. One example is the NIMH-funded PROSPECT trial. Completed in 2003, PROSPECT showed a 

positive result when a collaborative team involving a depression 

care manager and physicians working in primary care practices 

came together to treat depression. Intervention participants 

showed significant reductions in suicidal ideation at 4 and 8 

months when compared with the treatment-as-usual group. 

I will now focus on the IMPACT study. In 1998, the John A. 

Hartford Foundation took the lead in supporting the study ‘‘Improving Mood-Promoting Access to Collaborative Treatment,’’ or 

IMPACT. Dr. Jurgen Unutzer, now at the University of Washington, is the IMPACT principal investigator. 

IMPACT focused on treatment of major depression and 

dysthymia in the elderly. Patients were drawn from 18 primary 

care clinics, from 8 health care organizations in 5 States, and were 

randomized to working with depression clinical specialists in the 

primary care clinic versus receiving usual care for depression in 

primary care. Depression clinical specialists were trained to use an 

anti-depressant medication algorithm and they also received special training for delivering problem-solving therapy, a six- to eightsession brief, structured psychotherapy for depression. We found a 

powerful effect for the intervention in treating depression. 

More recently, we analyzed the IMPACT data to determine the 

effect of the intervention on reducing suicidal ideation specifically. 

At baseline, just to give you an idea, 15 percent of intervention patients and 13 percent of treatment-as-usual patients reported 

thoughts of suicide. At 6 months and 12 months, intervention subjects had significantly lower rates of suicidal ideation than those in 

the comparison group. Remarkably, after the 1-year intervention 

was over, we still found an effect at 18 months and 24 months. 

There were no completed suicides in the study. Our findings will 

be published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society. 

I served as an IMPACT study psychiatrist at the Duke general 

internal medicine site. In that capacity, I met each week with the 

two depression clinical specialists to review the new and returning 

cases they had seen that week. We made specific written recommendations to the primary care physician, who had to sign off 

on them before they could be implemented. 

5

Thus, the main thrust of our collaborative work was two-fold: 

first, keeping the primary care physician in charge of the final 

treatment decision and, second, striving to keep the care of the depressed patient in the primary care setting. Occasionally, I would 

need to see patients largely to evaluate treatment refractory patients or to assess suicide risk. 

I am happy to report to you that at the Duke site, this collaborative care model did not end when the IMPACT study ended. As 

you might imagine, the primary care physicians in the practice 

came to value highly their work with the depression clinical specialists. As the IMPACT study wound down, we moved to implement the model as a clinical service in primary care. Now, I work 

with a master’s-level clinical nurse specialist who functions as a 

care manager in primary care. We have also expanded the patient 

population to include adults ages 18 and above. In the past 4 years, 

the care manager has seen 478 referred patients in over 3,000 visits, including 171 older adults and 129 older adults with depression. 

The Hartford Foundation is currently supporting efforts aimed at 

implementation of the IMPACT model, including care manager 

training seminars and development of educational materials to 

help clinic managers incorporate the model into primary care practices. In sum, IMPACT provides a good model for tackling the problem for suicide in the elderly. It focuses on management of depression, the condition most commonly associated with suicide. 

Its other key feature, provision of care in the primary care setting, is appealing for several reasons. For one, older adults may 

perceive stigma of mental illness more than other age groups and 

thus may be more reluctant to go to a separate psychiatric clinic. 

Second, most older adults have primary care doctor, but they may 

not have access to a psychiatrist, let alone a geriatric psychiatrist. 

Third, the IMPACT study has shown that most depressions can be 

treated in the primary care setting. 

It has been both personally and professionally satisfying to me 

to be able to implement in the clinical setting an intervention that 

I know works in the research setting. I look forward to hearing 

your thoughts and questions about suicide and suicide prevention, 

about the IMPACT study, and about ways we might be able to 

make changes in our health care system that will make a real difference in addressing the alarming suicide rates experienced by our 

greatest generation of older Americans. 

Thank you. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Doctor. My question really comes out 

of a conversation I had recently with one of my colleagues, who 

happens to be a baby doc deliverer, Senator Coburn, of Oklahoma, 

who indicated to me that fully half of his practice was psychiatrist 

counseling. I don’t speak for him, but I believe he represented to 

me a view that he felt mental health teaching parity is vitally 

needed in our medical schools. 

When I talk to medical school folks, they say, oh, no, everything 

is fine, we cover that. Yet, I am not sure I have talked to a doctor 

who says to me—they are not psychiatrists, but they say, you 

know, I got a little bit, but I really didn’t know it sufficiently to 

6

treat it in a primary care setting. I am wondering if you can comment on the notion of mental health teaching parity. 

Dr. STEFFENS. Thank you, Senator. We certainly have experienced that at Duke University and I think our school is not alone 

in this. As technology advances, there is a temptation to become 

quite enamored of it in medical school teaching, to be at the cutting 

edge, and there is only so much time that is left for teaching. We 

find particularly when teaching psychiatry and managing mental 

illness that the formal amount of time that is set aside for psychiatry rotations is lessened. That tends to, I think, give the impression that these illnesses are less important. 

Unfortunately, it is a sad reality in many teaching institutions 

that other specialties and an emphasis on technology may be more 

prominent, and therefore you get not only short shrift in terms of 

the time spent, but the overall message it sends to our future workforce of doctors about the importance of mental illness is worrisome 

to me as well. 

The CHAIRMAN. So you think some emphasis perhaps from Congress on mental health care teaching——

Dr. STEFFENS. Yes, sir. 

The CHAIRMAN. You think we ought to do that? 

Dr. STEFFENS. Yes, sir. Any incentives that can be provided in 

terms of mental health teaching, involvement more of faculty with 

expertise and, in fact, teaching about models like the IMPACT 

model about the importance of collaborative care are important. 

The CHAIRMAN. You would agree, I suppose, given your background, that if a person has physical health but not mental health, 

they don’t have health. 

Dr. STEFFENS. It is a matter of quality of life and I certainly 

agree with that, Senator. 

The CHAIRMAN. As you consider the primary care industry system, how would you grade it in our country right now in terms of 

mental health? 

Dr. STEFFENS. In terms of mental health, it is hard because just 

thinking about the——

The CHAIRMAN. When you look at your model and how effective 

it is, how many have those models? 

Dr. STEFFENS. It is something that is sorely needed. It is certainly a vast minority of practices that have the ability right now 

to incorporate this model. So anything that you all can do to help 

with that——

The CHAIRMAN. You are a teacher. You grade papers, don’t you? 

How would you grade primary care as to mental health? Would you 

give them a D? 

Dr. STEFFENS. I want to be more encouraging to them, so I will 

give them a C——

The CHAIRMAN. OK, they got a C. 

Dr. STEFFENS [continuing]. In part because I think there is a recognition of the importance of depression. It is now a matter of what 

tools can we do, given how busy primary care physicians are, to 

help them then effectively treat depression in the primary care setting. 

The CHAIRMAN. Would you agree with me that Tom Cruise is a 

great actor? 

7

Dr. STEFFENS. He is a fantastic actor, yes, sir. 

The CHAIRMAN. What kind of a mental health physician do you 

think he is? 

Dr. STEFFENS. I think that——

The CHAIRMAN. Let me ask you a better question. 

Dr. STEFFENS. Yes, yes. [Laughter.] 

Is post-partum depression real? Is it a legitimate medical condition? 

Yes, sir. 

The CHAIRMAN. I agree. Is bipolar condition a real condition? 

Dr. STEFFENS. Yes, sir. 

The CHAIRMAN. How about schizophrenia? 

Dr. STEFFENS. Yes, sir. 

The CHAIRMAN. They are identifiable medical conditions? 

Dr. STEFFENS. They are. 

The CHAIRMAN. You know what they are and there are treatments for those that actually work? 

Dr. STEFFENS. Very effective treatments, yes, sir. 

The CHAIRMAN. I wanted that on the record. 

Dr. STEFFENS. Yes. 

The CHAIRMAN. I wonder, as you consider the primary care system, what can we in Congress do to help improve it? What specific 

things would you——

Dr. STEFFENS. Well, I know that, for example, Senator Kohl has 

mentioned the reauthorization of the training for geriatricians 

under Title VII. We are hopeful that that is something in terms of 

just the pipeline and access aspect. There are other things, including making the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—suggesting that they include a suicide assessment for individuals with 

mental illness as a quality indicator for care. 

There are some issues around the donut hole in Medicare Part 

D in terms of we do have effective treatments particularly on the 

pharmacology side, but they do have an expense and sometimes 

people will choose to drop their depression treatment as opposed to 

their diabetes or other types of treatments, unfortunately, at their 

own peril. So those are some aspects. 

The CHAIRMAN. We actually don’t have pharmacology parity, do 

we, in Federal law as relates to mental health? 

Dr. STEFFENS. Right, and we don’t have mental health parity 

more broadly, and it seems to me that this is one area, given that 

our focus is primary care, where perhaps a CPT code could be developed for this type of collaborative model that would, in fact, be 

reimbursed more at the 80-percent level than at just the 50-percent 

level. That may make it more attractive to primary care business 

managers to think about incorporating this if they see that they 

can get sufficient reimbursement such that it definitely adds the 

quality. But will it be either a revenue-neutral or a minor revenuelosing or a slightly revenue-producing enterprise? 

The CHAIRMAN. But if mental health care is legitimate, shouldn’t 

it be equal to physical? 

Dr. STEFFENS. Absolutely. 

The CHAIRMAN. OK, that is my point. Probably the most important thing we could do in a short-term, tangible way would be medicine parity for mental health. 

8

Dr. STEFFENS. Absolutely. 

The CHAIRMAN. Anything else you can identify? We have got 

teaching parity, pharmacological parity. Anything else? 

Dr. STEFFENS. I think we have covered most of the bases. 

The CHAIRMAN. Senator Kohl. 

Senator KOHL. Dr. Steffens, as you well know, primary care doctors who see patients with multiple chronic disease often don’t have 

the time to also do a full assessment of the patient’s mental state. 

In your program, they are on the front lines and very involved. Do 

you think that most doctors might be willing to take on this challenge? 

Dr. STEFFENS. I think that there will be a willingness, Senator, 

but I think that the truth is that right now the incentives are for 

spending very little time, in general, seeing patients both in terms 

of the reimbursement that one gets from third-party payers, but 

even clinic managers sometimes will give bonuses if people can 

keep their volume up. So, certainly, there are very few incentives. 

So I think that primary care physicians now understand the importance of treating depression, but they have, I think, one of the 

toughest jobs out there in terms of trying to balance all of the patient’s problems, treating the patient as a whole and trying to incorporate time to deal with depression. 

This is one model, Senator, that I think would be very helpful 

to the primary care doc because it keeps physicians not only in the 

loop, but at least the way we have implemented it, they have to 

sign off on the recommendations that the care manager makes 

after consultation with me. So this is something that I think they 

would find very appealing because it is not, well, we will just refer 

it out and maybe I will get a note about it every once in a while. 

That is not the way that this works. This is something that intimately involves the primary care physician and I think that they 

would be open to it. 

Senator KOHL. Well, data from your program show that patients 

had fewer suicidal thoughts after 6 months of therapy and medication. If this is a successful model, then how should we encourage 

more doctors and health care systems to use it? 

Dr. STEFFENS. I think that, one, the financial incentives, changes 

to the system that we have talked about in terms of mental health 

parity; improving access that they have to geriatricians by increasing the pool of geriatricians; making people aware through meetings like this about resources that are available, for example, 

through the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, through 

the John A. Hartford Foundation that sponsored the original study. 

They are now moving into what is called IMPACT II, which is 

actually the dissemination of information and production of tool 

kits for primary care physicians and managers to describe how 

they can best incorporate this model. 

Senator KOHL. Primary care physicians who deal with chronic 

diseases in the elderly are not trained or qualified in many cases 

to deal with the mental aspect of it. To the extent that this is true 

or, as you pointed out, they don’t have the time to pursue this, how 

do we get beyond this? If we don’t get beyond this, it seems to me, 

we are not going to deal with the problem. 

9

Dr. STEFFENS. I think that certainly now there is a recognition. 

If you look at the journals in primary care, as well as the conferences that are sponsored, depression and mental illness are now 

incorporated. So I think the message is trying to get out there that 

mental disorders are just like other physical conditions and should 

be part of what primary care physicians can deal with. 

The sad truth is that most depressions can be managed in the 

primary care setting if appropriate time is allotted. So I think 

again that the willingness is there. It is a matter of managing 

time, of providing the incentives, for example, through changes in 

Medicare, providing certain CPT codes that would actually allow 

for them to spend the time or to work in the collaborative model 

as well. 

Senator KOHL. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Senator. 

Doctor, thank you very much. We appreciate your contribution 

this morning. It has been very helpful. 

Dr. STEFFENS. Thank you, sir. 

The CHAIRMAN. We honor your work and we just need to get it 

out on a larger basis. 

Dr. STEFFENS. Thank you, sir. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Steffens follows:]

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The CHAIRMAN. Our second panel will consist of Dr. Richard 

Colenda. He serves as the dean of the Texas A&M Health Sciences 

Center in the College of Medicine and is the current president of 

the Association of Geriatric Psychiatry. Dr. Colenda will provide an 

overview of current mental health curricula in medical academia 

and discuss specific efforts needed to improve mental health services for seniors. 

He will be followed by my constituent, Dr. Mel Kohn, who is 

State epidemiologist and administrator for the Office of Disease 

Prevention and Epidemiology in the Oregon Department of Human 

Services. Dr. Kohn will discuss Oregon’s innovative efforts to combat elder suicide on a statewide level. 

Senator Kohl has already introduced his constituent, Art 

Walaszek, who is a geriatric psychiatrist and the residency training 

director at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. As a clinician, Dr. Walaszek will present his personal 

experience treating seniors with mental health illnesses and discuss solutions to some of the barriers confronting seniors as they 

seek help. 

Finally, we will hear from Dr. David Shern, who is the president 

and CEO of the National Association of Mental Health. Dr. Shern 

brings with him a long history of advocacy and expertise in the 

area of mental health. His testimony will focus on current programs in place to reduce the rate of suicide in seniors. 

Thanks to all of you for coming. Dr. Colenda, take it away. 

STATEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER C. COLENDA, M.D., M.P.H., THE 

JEAN AND THOMAS MCMULLIN DEAN OF MEDICINE, TEXAS 

A&M UNIVERSITY, COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS, AND PRESIDENT, AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR GERIATRIC PSYCHIATRY 

Dr. COLENDA. Good morning, sir. Mr. Chairman and members of 

the Committee, I am Chris Colenda. I am dean of Medicine at the 

Texas A&M Health Science Center, and also president of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry. My testimony this morning reflects both my work in academic medicine, which involves the 

education and preparation of the next generations of physicians, as 

well as my own clinical and research practice which is in geriatric 

psychiatry. 

As heard earlier, the toll of mental illness among older adults, 

those age 65 and older, is stunning. Suicide is the horrible outcome 

of late-life mental illness, especially those with depression, and 

older men have the highest rates of suicide in the Nation. Onethird of older adults who die from suicide have seen their primary 

care physician in the week before their deaths, and 70 percent have 

seen their physicians within the last month of life. 

Mr. Chairman, depression is not a normal part of aging. Depression is an illness that can be successfully treated at any age that 

it strikes. The symptoms that a practitioner, either a generalist or 

a mental health specialist, needs to recognize often vary according 

to age and culture, but depression is real and treatable. 

How can we improve the quality of health care delivered to the 

elderly and thus prevent or ameliorate the tragic outcomes for seniors such as suicide and reduced quality of life? As you heard earVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:52 Jan 29, 2007 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00048 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\DOCS\32402.TXT SAGING1 PsN: JOYCE
45

lier, we know a lot and we know what works, but I offer three main 

strategies from the perspective of a dean of a medical school. 

The first is to improve the content of geriatric curriculum and 

core competencies throughout the continuum of medical education 

from medical school, through residency, through continuing medical 

education. This education should include late-life psychiatric disorders. 

We must also have sufficient numbers of geriatric mental health 

specialists to lead the field in research, education and treatment. 

We must move to integrated longitudinal systems of care that bring 

together multiple health care disciplines—primary care, mental 

health care and rehabilitation—with the goal of promoting functional independence and quality of life. 

Academic medicine must increase its commitment to these aspects of professional training, but what makes this issue so striking 

is that in the hyper-competitive environment of academic medicine, 

we are not getting the necessary resources to make sure that these 

programs are in place. Competition for time and resources in training is a huge factor in both mental health and primary care specialties. 

Mental health is complicated and stigmatized, and so is old age. 

The two together lead to a collective set of negative attitudes that 

lead to significant disincentives both in terms of financial reimbursement for services at medical schools as well as the intangibles 

derived from the long-held and deeply ingrained dual stigma of 

mental illness and fragile old age. 

In my written testimony, I have suggested a number of specific 

steps that the Federal Government should take to begin to address 

this problem. First, we need a solid study commissioned by the Institute of Medicine to determine the geriatric medicine and geriatric mental health and geriatric psychiatry workforce needs to 

serve the next generation of patients coming through the pipeline. 

We need to summarize the best practices for programs delivering 

mental health services such as what you heard earlier today in primary care and community settings. We need to incorporate tool 

sets to provide best educational and training practices to enhance 

geriatric core competencies and promote inter-professional education. 

We need to fund the geriatric health professions education programs such as those that were under Title VII. We need geriatric 

loan forgiveness programs to encourage practitioners to specialize 

in geriatrics and the requirements for inclusion of older adults in 

clinical trials. We need the NIMH to dedicate more research time 

and more research resources for mental health and psychiatric illnesses in older adults. 

Finally, sir, the financing of our health care systems, especially 

for the elderly and especially those with late-life mental disorders, 

requires a fresh look. Today’s system of reimbursement for primary 

care, preventive and mental health services does not foster integration and compassionate longitudinal care. It fragments care either 

through volume or through technology. Our current financing system rewards technology, and in so doing provides strong incentives 

for young physicians to pursue careers where the money is, as opVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:52 Jan 29, 2007 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00049 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\DOCS\32402.TXT SAGING1 PsN: JOYCE
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posed to the rewarding careers of primary care, psychiatry, geriatric medicine and geriatric psychiatry. 

Without fundamental financial reform, we will not recruit the 

best and the brightest into the field. In my lifetime, without fundamental financial reform and because of the demographic imperatives of the baby-boom generation, the health care system will simply collapse. Academic medicine has a steep hill to climb in developing and implementing adequate training for practitioners who 

care for the elderly. The scope and the size of the task are going 

to increase sharply over the next two decades. 

Mr. Chairman, academic medicine and the field of geriatric psychiatry and geriatric medicine welcome this Committee’s active 

concern about this issue and we look forward to working with you 

to help increase the public’s awareness and to combine public and 

private resources to help find remedies for this issue. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Colenda follows:]

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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Those are excellent suggestions. 

I think in the interest of time, before the vote comes up, we will 

ask questions after, Senator Kohl. 

Dr. Kohn. 

STATEMENT OF MELVIN KOHN, M.D., M.P.H., STATE 

EPIDEMIOLOGIST, PUBLIC HEALTH DIVISION, OREGON 

DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES, SALEM, OR 

Dr. KOHN. Mr. Chairman, Senator Kohl, thank you very much 

for inviting me to speak with you today. For the record, I am Dr. 

Mel Kohn. I am the State Epidemiologist in the Public Health Division at the Oregon Department of Human Services. In that capacity, I oversee a wide variety of public health programs, including 

communicable disease control, chronic disease control, and injury 

prevention, and it is in the latter capacity that I have gotten involved with the suicide prevention work that we have been doing. 

Today is actually my 47th birthday, and thank you; it is really 

a very nice birthday present to be able to come and speak about 

something that I feel very passionately about and I think is really, 

really important. 

The CHAIRMAN. I could actually think of better places to be on 

your birthday, but we are glad you are here. [Laughter.] 

Dr. KOHN. Senator Smith, I also really want to thank you and 

your wife for the courageous leadership that you have provided for 

suicide prevention efforts. 

When I talk about suicide, one of the first places I like to start 

is with how big a problem this is. I think most people are surprised 

to learn that every year in the United States we have roughly 

20,000 homicides that occur. We all agree that is a huge problem, 

but we have over 30,000 suicides that occur every year. 

In my State of Oregon, almost three-quarters of our violent 

deaths are due to suicide. In 2003, almost 600 Oregonians died 

from suicide, and that is more than the number of Oregonians who 

died in motor vehicle crashes. 

The CHAIRMAN. Give me that number again. 

Dr. KOHN. Almost 600 Oregonians in 2003. 

As folks have already alluded to, the rate of suicide increases 

dramatically with age. In recent years, in Oregon, the rate of suicide among those age 65 was three times the rate among those age 

10 to 24. I should say this is not unique to Oregon. For all States, 

the age group with the highest suicide rate is older adults. 

Now, because of this huge toll that suicide is taking, our injury 

prevention program, together with other partners from our human 

services agency working in mental health and in senior services, 

convened a statewide planning process to create an older adult suicide prevention plan. I did bring a few copies with me and I will 

share those with you afterwards. They are also available on our 

website. 

The CHAIRMAN. When did you produce that? 

Dr. KOHN. This was launched, I believe, last year. It is fairly recent. 

Through a grant from the Centers for Disease Control, we convened a multidisciplinary work group that reviewed available data 

and research literature and interviewed experts in the field, as well 

55

as service providers and older adults. With this information, we developed a prevention framework. We then held six community forums around the State to gather public input on the proposed 

framework, which also served to raise awareness about what a 

huge problem this is. Based on what we learned, we wrote our 

plan. 

For this process, we were very fortunate that we had funding 

from the Centers for Disease Control for the National Violent 

Death Reporting System. That data source allowed us to learn 

many more details about the circumstances of older adult suicide 

in Oregon that were useful for crafting our prevention approach. 

For example, almost 50 percent of the men and 60 percent of the 

women above age 65 who died by suicide were reported to have a 

depressed mood before death—perhaps not surprising. However, 

only a small proportion of those depressed people, 14 percent of the 

men and 29 percent of the women, were under treatment for their 

depression, suggesting that screening and treatment for depression 

might have saved many of these lives. 

Ninety-three percent of the decedents had a chronic illness and 

over a third of them had visited a physician in the last 30 days of 

their life, suggesting, as has already been discussed, that primary 

care office visits are a very feasible opportunity for intervention. 

Similarly, more than a third of the decedents were reported to 

be very socially isolated or living alone, suggesting that providing 

some social supports might have been helpful. There are some papers in the research literature to suggest that with some fairly lowcost kinds of interventions to address that social isolation issue, we 

can make a real difference in people’s lives. 

But there isn’t really a single intervention that is going to fix 

this problem. There is no pill that we are going to give out that 

is going to solve this whole thing. We really need a multi-faceted 

approach, and I think in accord with what we learned from our Oregon data, our plan is divided into two main groups of strategies—

clinically based suicide prevention activities and community-based 

suicide prevention. 

Some of the examples of clinically based suicide prevention you 

have already heard about, but in the community-based area, programs to increase public awareness about the problem, reduce social isolation and provide social services to help older adults cope 

with challenges they may be facing. This kind of multidisciplinary 

collaboration is really critical. 

So while this may seem like a sad topic, I want to tell you that 

it has been incredibly invigorating and exciting for our group to be 

working on this. The need is enormous out there. People recognize 

this, and the response from the community and from health care 

and social service providers has been tremendous. 

So I want to ask both of you to continue to call attention to this 

problem, as you are doing today, and to integrate your awareness 

of this problem with the other aspects of services to seniors that 

you might hear about in this Committee. Of course, all of this work 

takes resources and I hope that you will continue supporting funding for efforts to address this problem particularly at the State and 

local level. 

Thank you. 

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[The prepared statement of Dr. Kohn follows:]


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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. 

Dr. Walaszek. 

STATEMENT OF ART WALASZEK, M.D., ASSISTANT PROFESSOR 

OF PSYCHIATRY AND DIRECTOR OF PSYCHIATRY RESIDENCY TRAINING, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SCHOOL OF 

MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH, MADISON, WI 

Dr. WALASZEK. Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Kohl and members of the Committee, thank you for the invitation to testify before 

the Committee this morning. 

I would like to share my experiences as a physician working on 

the front lines of geriatric mental health care. I work on a daily 

basis with older adults who are suffering from depression and suicidal thinking. I work with their family members, who must watch 

as their loved ones struggle with depression, a devastating and potentially lethal disease. I work with medical students and residents, in other words, with the doctors who will soon be taking care 

of older adults. I would like to share my concerns based on these 

various experiences and my concerns about our ability to address 

late-life depression and break the cycle of senior suicide. 

First, my patients face a number of barriers as they seek care 

for depression. I would like to illustrate this by presenting a typical 

clinical scenario. A 70-year-old married retired gentleman has lost 

interest in activities, is sad everyday and has withdrawn from his 

wife, children and grandchildren. In the face of a number of medical problems—heart disease, high blood pressure, chronic pain—he 

has become hopeless and even harbored thoughts that life isn’t 

worth living. He has clinical depression and clearly is at risk of suicide. How does he, in fact, get help? 

First, he will have to overcome a double stigma: stigma about 

aging and stigma about mental illness. Our society tells him that 

decline and depression are a part of aging. He may have his own 

internal beliefs that he is not ill, that he doesn’t need treatment, 

and his low energy, low motivation and low interest—all symptoms 

of depression—may prevent him from talking to someone about depression. 

Second, once he has made the step to seek care, perhaps with the 

help of family members, he will need to get diagnosed. How will 

that happen? Well, as you have heard, primary care may be the 

best site to identify older adults who are at risk of suicide. My 70-

year-old patient goes to his primary care provider, who may have 

the best intentions to provide high-quality care. But it turns out 

that during his visit, they have to talk about heart disease, high 

blood pressure, medications for pain, exercise, eating right, losing 

weight, stopping smoking, and all in 15 minutes. So it wouldn’t be 

surprising if depression didn’t come up, and that would be an awful 

missed opportunity to possibly save this gentleman’s life. 

Third, let’s say he has been diagnosed as having depression. The 

next barrier is treatment. Anti-depressant medications are safe and 

effective treatments for depression. The Medicare prescription drug 

plan has helped some of my patients afford medications they 

couldn’t before, but as you have heard, some of them are now heading into the ‘‘donut hole’’. Furthermore, the complexity of the system can vex older adults suffering from depression, which affects 

60

their concentration, their memory and their ability to make decisions. 

Finally, psychotherapy or talking therapy is an evidence-based 

treatment for depression and was incorporated into the IMPACT 

model that Dr. Steffens described. It works and it reduces suicidal 

thoughts. Yet, Medicare’s fee structure, whereby only 50 percent of 

mental health services are covered, poses a financial barrier to my 

patient, who may be on a fixed income and has other rising costs 

and makes the decision not to seek psychotherapy as a type of 

treatment. 

Furthermore, qualified therapists who must themselves raise 

their own families and run their own businesses may not seek 

Medicare patients because the reimbursement is too low. So there 

may be a double barrier in terms of my patient being able to get 

what is a standard of care, psychotherapy, for depression. 

We are soon going to face an even bigger barrier. Although the 

number of older adults needing medical care is going up, the number of clinicians who can treat them is going down. I have seen this 

myself from the time when I was in medical school when the focus 

was on getting medical students into primary care, to now, where 

a minority of medical students are going to eventually end up in 

primary care. At this rate, I don’t see how we are going to have 

anywhere close to the number of clinicians treating older adults 

that we need. 

The CHAIRMAN. If they do go into primary care, are they going 

to know how to treat them? 

Dr. WALASZEK. That is an additional question, absolutely. 

In closing, I thank the Committee for addressing the issue of 

late-life suicide. Without immediate intervention on many fronts, 

my patients will face growing barriers to treating depression and 

reducing the risk of suicide. I worry about them and I worry about 

my practice, my ability to provide high-quality medical care and 

thereby fulfill my duty to alleviate the suffering of older adults. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Walaszek follows:]

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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much. 

Dr. Shern. 

STATEMENT OF DAVID SHERN, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, NATIONAL MENTAL HEALTH ASSOCIATION, 

ALEXANDRIA, VA 

Mr. SHERN. Chairman Smith, Senator Kohl, thank you so much. 

It is wonderful to be here today, and happy birthday. I am the 

president of the National Mental Health Association and have held 

this position now for 10 days. So I am learning an awful lot about 

the Mental Health Association and about Washington traffic. I had 

just a delightful drive in this morning down 395. 

The CHAIRMAN. Would you say that contributes to mental health 

difficulties? [Laughter.] 

Mr. SHERN. I have an enormous sense of wellness right now, having sat in traffic and being late for my first-ever opportunity to testify to a Senate committee. It is a great honor to be here. 

Senator Smith, I have had the opportunity to meet you and your 

wife on other occasions, and the kind of inspirational leadership 

that you have in taking the horrible thing that happened to you in 

your life and making it into something that changes other people’s 

lives is an inspiration to all of us and it makes an enormous difference. 

The panel has done a spectacular job of summarizing the issues, 

that we need to confront. The biggest issue is taking our considerable research base—we need more work—and figuring out how to 

get it in action. Prior to joining the NMHA, I was also a dean. So 

I am a dean in early stages of recovery. I chose to leave academia, 

which was an extremely difficult decision for me because I felt that 

this opportunity at the National Mental Health Association would 

give me a direct chance to try to move research into action through 

public education and policy advocacy. 

There is no area where the issues are clearer than in the integration of general health and mental health within a single concept, 

and taking our considerable research base and putting it in place. 

As everybody has mentioned this morning, mental health problems 

are not trivial problems; they are fatal problems. These problems 

kill lots of people every year. We could characterize the situation 

as really a national embarrassment. That we continue, with the 

technology and information we have, to allow 30,000 people a year 

to die by suicide should be shameful for us as a society. 

One of the mental health themes that we always talk about is 

stigma, ignorance and discrimination. In fact, it is so important 

that we are launching a national public information campaign 

today. At exactly this same moment, at the National Press Club, 

we’re announcing the ‘‘Depression Is Real’’ campaign, and this campaign reflects a seven-member coalition, including the National 

Mental Health Association, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the American Psychiatric Foundation, the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, the Urban League, LULAC, and the National Medical Association, each of which is committed to drilling 

this message to the general public that depression is real, it is 

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pression, which would have direct effects on driving down the suicide rate. 

The groups that the National Mental Health Association is collaborating with on this particular initiative, reflect minority groups 

in important measure. As you all know, if we look at people of color 

in this Nation, we find great disparities in terms of their access to 

health care and mental health care, and we find great disparities 

in terms of their health status. They don’t do as well. That lack of 

access causes problems. 

Older adults, with regard to mental health care, would fall right 

into that category. There are enormous disparities with regard to 

their access to care; there have been for years. The demographic 

comparative everybody has been talking about is as clear as it can 

possibly be. The baby-boomers, and I consider myself among them, 

are marching toward our older years and unless we develop more 

effective strategies to deal with these issues, we are going to be in 

big trouble. 

People today have highlighted several of the models that are 

available. We have a model at the Florida Mental Health Institute 

FMHI which we developed for alcohol and substance abuse treatment that works with elders in the settings in which they show up, 

rather than trying to get them to go to specialty settings. It doesn’t 

focus on primary care. It focuses on aging centers and other areas 

where elders congregate. It is very low-intensity, inexpensive to try 

to recognize and treat alcoholism and prescription drug abuse, 

which you know are also real problems in elders. 

Our colleagues at Cornell are developing programs to use natural 

helpers, people like home visitors, Meals on Wheels, to try to get 

some new systems of care in place utilizing a broader base of workforce and non-traditional settings to reach out to people who have 

traditionally not chosen to participate in care. 

I will end by bringing us back to parity because it is fundamental. It fundamentally reflects in our statutes, in our policies, in 

our State regulations the discrimination against these disorders. As 

the Surgeon General said, health is fundamental. Mental health is 

fundamental to health; they are not separate things. We cannot 

deal with them separately and we cannot continue to tolerate this 

discrimination statutorily built into our programs. One I will point 

out is the Medicare program, where there is a $50 co-pay for specialty mental health services, as opposed to a $20 co-pay for general health services. That is not acceptable. 

It has been a great honor to be here. This is a huge problem. I 

am committed, and all of our allies are, to making a difference in 

this area and I am confident, with your leadership, we will be able 

to really move the needle on this issue. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Shern follows:]

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The CHAIRMAN. David, I think your point—and all of you have 

made it, I believe—about the discrimination that exists in American law, Medicare, Medicaid, when it comes to mental health is 

truly beyond absurd; it is now an embarrassment. There really 

should be no higher issue of priority for us in Congress when we 

take up health care than to fix this. Please know that is No. 1 on 

my list. 

Mr. SHERN. I think it is in our enlightened self-interest to do 

that. I think ultimately we will get healthier, more productive communities. 

The CHAIRMAN. Yes. 

Mr. SHERN. Depression is, by 2010, going to be the most disabling illness, period, of all illnesses, according to the World Health 

Organization. If we continue to leave it untreated, we are just 

wasting enormous amounts of human capital. Those kinds of estimates need to be factored into these cost equations. We can’t simply look at revenue expenditure. 

The CHAIRMAN. In addition to pharmaceutical parity, you would 

add teaching parity, and how about research parity? 

Mr. SHERN. Absolutely, all of those things. 

The CHAIRMAN. Insurance parity is another issue, but we have 

not been able to get that through the bicameral system here. But 

we would add that as well along with insurance, research, pharmaceutical and teaching parity—if we are really going to be serious 

about addressing this issue. 

Mr. SHERN. I agree. 

The CHAIRMAN. I guess that is our job. We have got to march in 

order, Senator Kohl. 

David, you talk about this being a national embarrassment. Are 

there other nations, in your experience, in research that are doing 

this well? 

Mr. SHERN. You know, it is very interesting. Let’s talk about 

schizophrenia for a second rather than depression. The World 

Health Organization has done an international study of people 

with schizophrenia and one of the most surprising results from 

that study is that persons who have schizophrenia—and this is 

again using a standardized diagnostic technique culturally appropriate, so they have done the science all right. 

One of the most surprising findings from this international study 

is that people who have schizophrenia in Third World nations, in 

developing nations, actually have a much better course than people 

who have schizophrenia in First World nations. Now, we are not 

sure exactly why that is, and like all scientific findings, there are 

some nuances that I am glossing over a bit, but it is a main effect; 

we find it. 

Some people feel that it is because in Third World nations we 

can’t marginalize people from our communities. Everybody’s labor 

has to be involved if the community and the family is going to be 

successful, whereas in First World nations we have systems of disability that require people essentially to make public declarations 

that they are no longer able to contribute to their community or to 

their society in order to get basic health care and a basic belowsubsistence income. 

71

So it could be that as we look at some of the counterintuitive effects that we have with well-intentioned policies like the Social Security disability program, which is extraordinarily important. We 

need to think about somehow aligning these incentives differently 

so that we no longer marginalize people with severe disorders so 

they can engage productively in their community. There are other 

international differences, but I think for me that is a really important theme. 

The CHAIRMAN. It sounds to me like you are saying it is not just 

a national embarrassment, it is a worldwide embarrassment that 

we are not doing better. 

Mr. SHERN. Yes. 

The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Colenda, the four points you made—I have 

made note of those and we are going to add those others that I 

didn’t mention to David; we are going to add those to our priority 

list as well. 

In my dealings with seniors, when you have occasion to go and 

look in their medicine cabinet, it is just astonishing how many 

medicines they are taking. I wonder from your scientific perspective, is there like a pharmacological brew that has unintended effects on people’s mental health? Is the understanding of mental 

health well enough known so that as doctors are prescribing all 

these other things for various aches and pains, they may be fueling 

depression? 

Dr. COLENDA. Yes. I think that as I used to say to my residents 

and fellows, less is best. One of the things that we try to train our 

folks on is that pharmacology in late life is a complicated management issue for physicians to become familiar with. Quite frankly, 

many physicians do not understand the nuances of pharmacology 

for elders. 

I can give a personal example. My father was on a medication 

prior to his death that was given at the same dose that one would 

give to a 45-year-old healthy person, and he was 88 and he got 

toxic from it. Not being a quiet, retiring individual, I went thermonuclear with his primary care physician. That primary care physician was well-trained. He went to my medical school, and I was astounded that he was using a dose for a 45-year-old in an 88-yearold. 

So there is a tremendous gap between knowledge and practice, 

between what we know how to do and what we do in pharmacology. Certainly multiple medications can lead to things, not only 

to depression, but also to cognitive impairment, because many of 

the drugs that are prescribed have effects on brain functioning. 

The CHAIRMAN. Senator Kohl may need to leave shortly and I am 

going to follow with a second round because I have more questions. 

Senator Kohl, please. 

Senator KOHL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Gentlemen, listening to you all, you point out the fact that most 

people or a majority of those who commit suicide have seen a physician within a month or 2 months before they committed suicide. 

You have talked about physicians who are knowledgeable with respect to high blood pressure and all the other chronic diseases that 

our seniors face, but isn’t it true that if they were sufficiently 

knowledgeable and empowered to do the same kind of an analysis 

72

and examination of their psychiatric health, this problem, while 

never being eliminated, would be reduced significantly? Isn’t this 

going to have to happen in order for us to get to an alleviation of 

the problem of senior suicide? I mean, isn’t that a must that we 

need to be sure that our physicians are qualified, capable and interested in diagnosing and treating the problem just as they do 

with heart problems? Isn’t that right? 

Dr. COLENDA. Yes, sir, Senator Kohl, and it starts from day one 

of medical school and it needs to continue through continuing medical education. Fortunately, in medicine today we are going toward 

what we call competency-based education, demonstrating that a 

physician knows what he or she needs to know for that particular 

series of illnesses. 

As you heard from Dr. Steffens, primary care physicians are the 

front lines of health care in this country, and when they are scheduled for basically 7- to 8-minute office visits, trying to discover significant mental health issues in late life takes time, and time is of 

the essence for them in terms of running their busy practices. So 

we have looked toward collaborative care models to help with providing experts that assist primary care physicians to do the right 

thing. 

They want to do the right thing. They are dedicated health care 

professionals. But time is a major problem, and there are two ways 

to get reimbursed in Medicare right now—volume or technology. 

The only way that you can do volume is shorter and shorter periods 

of time. 

Senator KOHL. So it is not the seniors’ fault, it is our fault. Isn’t 

that right? 

Dr. COLENDA. Well, there is a whole body of literature on breast 

cancer research that has looked at how to help breast cancer patients be actively involved in the decision for their treatment. It is 

decision support programs for patients. In terms of dissemination 

of this, we need to be publicly and actively destigmatize mental illness in late life and say it is OK to go in to your doctor and say, 

you know, I am not feeling really good and it may be that I am 

sad and depressed, which keys the physician to do what he or she 

knows how to do. 

Dr. WALASZEK. We have devoted a lot of resources to teaching 

people about the signs of heart disease, having a heart attack, looking for those signs of chest pain, and that has been a tremendous 

investment and it has saved a lot of lives. I think we can do something similar to teach people and their family members about recognizing the warning signs of depression and suicide, and again to 

break down that stigma to make it easier to approach someone’s 

primary care provider not just because they are in pain or they are 

feeling nauseous or they need a refill of their medications, but because, in fact, they have been feeling sad and down and thinking 

about ending their lives recently. 

Mr. SHERN. Could I just add a couple of quick thoughts, one follows on Chris’s notion about picking up on the continuing medical 

education. We need to do that in a fundamentally different way 

than we have done it in the past. You know, we use methodologies 

that are oftentimes called spray and pray. You spray training on 

people and you pray some of it sticks. 

73

We need more systematic ways to follow up and support people 

in their practices. Hopefully we are rapidly developing the kind of 

electronic medical record systems that we need in this country. I 

am sure you all have thought a lot about that because it is a huge 

problem. It is amazing that I can go to Hong Kong and stick in my 

ATM card and get Hong Kong money and get my checkbook balance. But when I go to the doctor, I fill out, typically, an old blue 

form. The disconnect there is enormous. 

When we start to make that kind of data available, we can support people in making better decisions. We can prompt primary 

care physicians so they don’t have to try to remember everything. 

We can prompt them and help them look at the risk factors for a 

particular patient in a much more efficient way. 

The other thing we are learning, which I think is dramatic and 

I hope is really going to start to change this conversation, is the 

importance of comorbidities, of people who have more than one condition. We now know that if you have cardiac disease and depression, having the depression will predict dramatically different outcomes for you. You are much more likely to die if you have cardiac 

disease and depression than a person who only has cardiac disease. 

As we start to appreciate the complexity of the whole person, 

Senator Kohl, this will also give a chance to better integrate our 

thinking and destigmatize these illnesses, when you start to see 

what happens when you add them concurrently to a condition that 

no one would question in terms of its legitimacy. I think that will 

also help us improve practice. 

Senator KOHL. Thank you very much, and thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Senator Kohl. 

I have got a bunch of additional questions and apparently the 

vote isn’t going to be immediately, probably 15 minutes or so, so 

I would like to take advantage of your being here. 

Dr. Colenda, in addition to the four things you asked us to look 

at, I am interested in your—and, Art, you may have a comment on 

this, too. You are both in medical schools right now. What are the 

minimum psychiatric requirements for someone going into general 

practice today? 

Dr. COLENDA. If you look at the Liaison Committee for Medical 

Education Requirements, for medical schools—the requirement is 

that students must have ‘‘adequate experience in psychiatry,’’ as 

defined by general competencies; that is, diagnosing mental illness, 

being able to conduct an interview and learning fundamentals of 

treatments. 

The average experience in psychiatry in medical schools in the 

country is about 5 weeks. That is compared to 12 weeks in medicine, 12 weeks in surgery. The competition for time in the curriculum is such that with the explosion in technology and genetics 

and molecular medicine, there has been an increasing compression 

of time on things like psychiatry, neurology and other types of specialties that have historically had larger amounts of time in the 

curriculum. 

In primary care residencies, in family medicine, there is no required psychiatry rotation, but they do have to have certain general competencies met as part of their requirements for completion 

74

of residencies. It is similar to the spray-and-pray concept. We are 

trying to move from a fixed amount of time in the curriculum to 

demonstrating that Chris Colenda as a third-year medical student 

knows how to conduct an interview, knows how to diagnose major 

illnesses. Then Chris Colenda as a resident in primary care knows 

how to manage depression in a community setting, and that competency is then reinforced throughout time. We have the tools to 

do that, but it has been incredibly slow to try to move that forward 

because of the competition for time in our training programs, 

whether it is medical school or residency training. 

The CHAIRMAN. As Art pointed out, we have got a baby-boom 

generation about to become seniors, and you have pointed out the 

economics aren’t there in mental health. Assuming the Federal 

Government can purge the discrimination from the various policies 

we have, it seems to me that it is imperative that medical schools 

understand where the puck is going, where the ball is going, and 

the ball has got to be going in your direction. We have to get our 

policies in line with where the economics are going to be, and there 

are going to be in the geriatric field and in the mental health field. 

So I wonder if you have a comment, Art, about that. 

Dr. WALASZEK. Senator, I would like to make a comment about 

fragmentation of the medical system and how that is actually in 

parallel with how medical training occurs. You commented on all 

the different medications that you find in the prescription cabinet, 

and that is often because someone sees a cardiologist who prescribes three medications, a primary care doctor who is in charge 

of a couple of more, and a pulmonologist who adds a couple more. 

Just practicing on a daily basis, it is very hard to keep track of 

all of that, to keep all these folks in sync with each other and making sure that their medications are not interacting with each other 

and causing problems. You see that in medical training. These tend 

to be block experiences in the third and fourth year. You do your 

time in surgery, you do your time in medicine, you do your time 

in pediatrics, without getting a sense of what it is actually like to 

practice, which is that you are juggling many different things at 

the same time. 

So as a dean, I don’t know how realistic, Dr. Colenda, it is to see 

if that is going to change any, but it would seem that that would 

need to be a fundamental change in medical training. 

Dr. COLENDA. Medical education is under going reform. The last 

major reform was at the beginning of the 20th century. My hope 

is that the next major reform will be at the beginning of the 21st 

century. Hospital systems have gone to service lines, where it is integrated care. If you go into a hospital today, for heart disease at 

a major academic medical center, you get admitted to it is the cardiovascular service line. So you have cardiovascular surgeons, the 

cardiologist, the rehabilitation folks all working together to provide 

a continuity of care within a particular service line. 

We still are in the mode of, as Art says, 12 weeks of medicine, 

12 weeks of surgery. We need to move toward an integrated system 

of care because that is how docs are going to practice in the future. 

Now, as a dean, you would think that I have some control over the 

curriculum. I have a thousand points of ‘‘no’’ and they are called 

faculty. 

75

The CHAIRMAN. So you are in politics, too. [Laughter.] 

Dr. COLENDA. Yes, sir, and it is persuasion and guile and bribery 

and all the good things that my mother said I should not do as a 

physician. At Texas A&M Health Sciences Center, I am proud that 

we are making substantial changes in our curriculum that are 

pointing people toward the 21st century practice of medicine and 

not the 20th century practice of medicine. 

The CHAIRMAN. Mel, I have a hard question for you. First of all, 

happy birthday. 

Dr. KOHN. Thank you. 

The CHAIRMAN. You and I come from, I think, the best of the 50 

States, but we also have a law that allows physicians to assist in 

suicide. Now, let me be very careful to say for the record that that 

is the will of the people of Oregon, and that will has been affirmed 

by the United States Supreme Court and Congress is not going to 

change that. 

Given that law, how does that affect your work to prevent what 

we make legal? 

Dr. KOHN. Well, Senator Smith, I guess I would say one of the 

main ways it affects my work is that every time we talk about suicide, as somebody from Oregon, this issue gets raised. I think in 

many ways it is unfortunate that the two issues get mixed together 

because we are talking about in my mind two things, two patterns 

of behavior that really are very different. 

The CHAIRMAN. But you find anecdotally it is mixed all the time, 

and I do in every town hall where the issue comes up. 

Dr. KOHN. In terms of our data, by law, according to the Oregon 

law, deaths under Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act are not counted as suicides. So the numbers I gave to you before or any of the 

numbers that you see reported in either our data or the national 

data that come from our data—those deaths are not included in our 

counts for suicide. 

The CHAIRMAN. Yet without those numbers, we are the fourth 

highest in the Nation for senior suicide. 

Dr. KOHN. It is an enormous problem for us. 

The CHAIRMAN. There is an old maxim in lawmaking that whatever you legalize, you normalize and incentivize. Is that a problem 

in your work? 

Dr. KOHN. Well, when we look at the rates of suicide in Oregon 

over time, there has essentially been no change in the rates with 

the enactment of the Death With Dignity Act in Oregon. So I wish 

that the rates were dropping precipitously in Oregon, but they have 

continued to be high in Oregon both with and without the law. 

The CHAIRMAN. I appreciate your answer to that. It is a very difficult issue. They are apples-and-oranges issues, but I know in politics perception is reality, and that is how it is perceived not just 

in Oregon, but around the country, that we are sort of at cross-purposes. 

I am aware that SAMHSA awarded Oregon $100,000 in recognition of your and your agency’s leadership in the area of suicide prevention. I wonder if you can tell us how you will use the money. 

Has it helped? 

Dr. KOHN. Thank you, Senator. Yes, we did get that grant from 

SAMHSA and we have been using it in two ways. The first is along 

76

the lines of the discussion that we have already had in the Committee this morning to put together a training program for Oregon 

physicians, particularly primary care physicians, around this issue, 

and we are in the process of developing and launching that. 

The other thing that we have been doing is working on disseminating the plan more widely, and by that I mean getting more people engaged on this issue. We are going to be holding a series of 

community forums around the State. One of the things that I think 

is very clear to us is that this is an issue that needs to be addressed not just by the medical community, but by all of the service 

networks that we have that touch seniors’ lives. 

Dr. Shern referred to some of the other folks who come in contract with seniors who can be important gatekeepers and 

encouragers of people getting the treatment that they need. So part 

of the work that we are doing with communities around the State 

is to get these other networks of providers on board and engaged 

and using their resources to address this problem as well. 

The CHAIRMAN. Well, we appreciate so much what you are doing 

in this area. Suicide is just such a tragic outcome, particularly 

when it is entirely, utterly preventable. This hearing this morning 

has identified a lot of concrete things we can do at the Federal 

level, what you are doing at the State level, and certainly what we 

need to do at the university level, because this problem is not going 

away. It is going to get bigger as this population gets bigger, and 

we have got to have a better program and better answers than we 

are currently providing at every level of medicine and government. 

So I simply want to express to each of you how much I value 

your work and honor your profession. You are on the side of the 

angels as far as I am concerned. Whether it is a senior at 85 or 

a teenager at 18, we have got to do a better job. 

To David’s point earlier, we have a societal interest in this. I 

mean, some of the greatest people and leaders in history have been 

manic depressives. Abraham Lincoln comes to mind. Meriwether 

Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, was undoubtedly a manic 

depressive who at the end of the journey blew his brains out—actually, he shot himself in the heart, but tragic; I mean, a very gifted 

and bright man. Winston Churchill used to speak of it as his black 

dog. So there are a lot of bright lights we need to keep on running 

brightly, and you are on the front lines. 

So we thank you for spending your time with us. You have given 

us specific things to do and we will do our best to do them. Parity 

is an issue that is on my mind every time I get up in the morning. 

At the research, the medicine cabinet, the teaching and the insurance levels, we need to change our policies in the Federal Government, and count on you guys to change the medical schools and 

fight that political battle. I don’t know which is harder, in higher 

ed or in Washington, DC, but it is politics of the first order. But 

it is a life-and-death issue that you have to win and also one that 

we have to win here on the Hill. 

So with that, I would again express our genuine thanks, and 

happy birthday, Mel. So Chris, Mel, Art, David, physicians and doctors all, thank you, and we are adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 11:18 a.m., the Committee was adjourned.] 

(77)

A P P E N D I X 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR KEN SALAZAR

I thank Chairman Smith and Ranking Member Kohl for holding these hearings—

to address the troubling suicides rates among America’s seniors, and learn more 

about what we can do to reverse them. 

Recent studies continue to highlight disturbing trends in the suicide rates for 

older Americans. Loneliness, a loss of autonomy and independence, and anxiety 

about mounting bills and financial obligations contribute to the sense of hopelessness that ultimately drive seniors to end their lives. These are deeply personal matters, and many seniors are reluctant to express their thoughts and ask for help. 

However, as policy makers, I do not believe that we are powerless to help mitigate 

these effects. In the 1930’s, with the implementation of New Deal programs designed to provide a financial safety net for Americans as they reach retirement, 

America saw a dramatic down turn in the rates of senior suicides. This trend has 

continued through the past decades with the creation of the Medicare program and 

the Older Americans Act. 

These important programs have helped to provide seniors with invaluable aid as 

they retire, assistance to receive the medications they need—and communicates a 

message that they are not alone, and America will not abandon the promises it has 

made to care for them and see that they age with dignity. 

The Senior Community Service and Employment Program—under the Older 

Americans Act—has been a great example in my home state of Colorado, and 

throughout the country, of the value of such senior programs. The SCSEP program 

not only helps low-income seniors develop the necessary skills to re-enter the workforce, it also helps to renew the individual’s sense of self worth. These factors decrease the risk of depression among seniors—and lower the risk of suicide. 

We have a duty to continue the legacy of these programs and honor the promises 

our generation has made to generations before us. The fact that the American population continues to age with the baby boomer generation implies that these programs are more important than ever, and we must strengthen our resolve to protect 

and enhance them. 

Community organizations at the local and national level have played an important role in preventing suicide, educating the public, and bringing the issue of suicide prevention to the forefront. Activity within my home state of Colorado on this 

front has been tremendous—and I am pleased to see that the Suicide Prevention 

Resource Center is holding their annual conference for many western states in Colorado this October. 

However, despite these important advances, suicide rates among senior citizens, 

particularly white males, continue to be much greater than the suicide rates of 

every other age group. 

At the personal level, early identification of suicide risk factors is key to mitigating and preventing elder suicides. Identifying these risk factors is shared by 

many parties—from primary care physicians, and long term care providers—to family members and community care organizations. 

Increasing the accessibility of seniors to affordable healthcare and prescription 

drugs, combined with greater access to mental health services will continue to be 

critical in identifying these factors, as well as increasing help seeking behavior. 

I look forward to the testimony and insight from today’s panel of expert witnesses 

on these fronts to further illuminate this problem, and discuss what steps we can 

take to reverse this current trend. 

Thank you again.

Æ