(upbeat music) - Hi, everyone.

Steve Adubato.

We kick off the program with an important conversation with Kenneth Esser Jr.

Otherwise known as Kenny Esser because we've known each other a long time.

Kenny is Executive Vice President of Behavioral Health at Hackensack Meridian Health, a long time underwriter of our program, and also president of HMH's Carrier Clinic.

Ken, good to see you.

- Great to see you, Steve.

Appreciate being on the program.

- You got it.

Our focus is on behavioral health.

Make the connection between Carrier Clinic, behavioral health, and your role, please Ken.

- Yep, great question.

Great way to start us off.

So when we talk behavioral health, we're talking about the whole gamut.

We're talking about psychiatry, mental health conditions, but we're also talking about substance use disorder and just other stresses that somebody may have in their life that's causing mental or physical impact.

And so it can be something as severe as needing medication and going into an inpatient psychiatric facility like Carrier Clinic, but it could also just mean something as basic as some marriage or family counseling sessions that are necessary to work through an issue.

- Kenny has the world of mental health and PS checkout, the previous I interview we did with Kenny's colleague Dr. Eric Alcera, who really talked extensively about mental health issues regarding adolescents in particular.

Kenny, let me ask you something.

To what degree do you believe COVID has changed the world of behavioral slash mental health forever?

- Yeah, I think I'll answer it in two ways, Steve.

It's really hard to parse out how much of it's COVID and how much of it's just the impact of social media and phones on young generation 'cause both of those things have kind of happened at the same time.

But on the positive side, COVID forced us to do some things like telehealth and telepsychiatry services that we weren't using nearly as much pre-2020.

And when you compare to the other specialties, that's the one area where people continue using telepsych services to access those care pathways.

And in a world where 50% of the people who need help are not getting help, making that easily accessible through telepsych services, I think is huge.

- I'm curious about this.

I've done a fair amount of leadership and communication coaching at HMH as well.

And this issue of telecommunication comes up a lot.

I work with some physicians and other folks who communicate this way.

And I often wonder when it comes to telepsychiatry or therapy, if you will, this way, do you and your colleagues, particularly the clinicians, Ken, in this field believe it's the quality is any different or the experience is any different?

If so, how?

- Yeah, I mean, without a doubt, the experience in any interaction between two humans is different in person versus on Zoom.

So I think we start there.

I think really one of the underlying factors here that's important to realize is that we have a shortage of psychiatrists.

We have a shortage of behavioral health practitioners across society right now.

And what we need to do is do whatever we can to tear down those barriers, to give people access, to make it easy to access.

So when you have somebody, and this is a nationwide problem, when you have somebody sitting in an emergency room, you know, for dozens of hours waiting to be seen by a psychiatrist because there's a shortage of psychiatrists, that's certainly not something that's acceptable in certainly my America or healthcare system.

So how do we make that available?

And one way we can do that quickly, efficiently is using telepsychiatry 'cause we can pull on psychiatrists from all around the country and get them on that screen in your ED room, and get you at least some direction of what you need.

- Kenny, distinguish a psychiatrist or medical doctors who have gone to medical school and can prescribe medication.

Psychologist, obviously a different background.

How the heck does one know which professional they need?

- Well, I think that's where we need to do a good job in our field to make those decisions for them, right?

You know, Steve, they may come to us in an ED, but they may also come to us in a family medicine practice and talking to somebody.

And how do we connect with that patient as we, as the healthcare system, make that easy to make those connections to patients.

We're doing some things like the pediatric site collaborative and some other things, but I really think that that onus is on us of the healthcare providers to make that transition seamless so that the patient gets to who they need to see.

- Go back to the issue of younger people dealing with mental health issues.

The organization has begun a $40 million Carrier Clinic, a construction of a new facility dedicated to younger patients as young as seven.

Talk about that facility.

- Great project, Steve, $40 million project.

It's gonna be a 52 bed unit.

All new construction here at Carrier Clinic.

Unfortunately, the reality of the patients we're seeing across the system, we do feel like we're gonna need to set aside some rooms to treat patients as young as seven years old.

And as much as that breaks in my heart, it's just a reality of the world that we live in today.

With that said, it's gonna have some beautiful views of the Sourland Mountains, all new equipment, state-of-the-art facility, and I think it's really gonna give our adolescent population you know, the type of care that they deserve and really world-class treatment.

- And Kenny says this is not only, as a professional in the field, but I, as a dad with young children, I know this is particularly relevant, and that's why the screen time issue.

Could you give me 30 seconds on the screen time and then I wanna talk about this mushroom issue, Kenny?

Screen time and mental health.

- Yeah, I mean, the great book "Anxious Generation" talks a little bit about that intersection of smartphone, social media, and not passing any judgment over protective parenting and how that change of childhood has taken place in this country.

And so I think we've just gotta figure out, just like we had to figure out many years ago with the TV, and with us latchkey kids, we've gotta find a way to get that delicate balance so that it's part of our lives and not running our lives.

and I think we've got a long way to go, but I appreciate that the conversation is starting.

- Kenny, you have a background in government and you understand a little bit about how the legislative and public policy world works.

What is the issue as it relates to legalizing the use of this term magic mushrooms?

Is it official?

I mean, what are magic mushrooms?

A and B, what is the legislature dealing with?

- Yep.

- And finally, how the heck is it connected to mental health?

- So we're talking about psilocybin, which is one of those magic mushroom drugs that causes hallucination, a dissolution of the ego.

It’s combined with...

It's psilocybin-assisted therapy.

So there's therapy session involved here.

That really works to untangle some of the issues that a patient might be going through including treatment resistant depression, eating disorders, some things like that.

The research is very promising and our fingers are crossed that this is gonna provide relief to many of our patients that are suffering from it.

But yeah, the legislation, what it does is just kind of opens the door.

We've got a committee that we're gonna work through and figure out a lot of these details.

- But Kenny, that's in the state.

Federally, it's against the law.

It's illegal.

- That's correct, but we're going through the FDA process.

And we've partnered with one of those psilocybin firms as they go through that FDA process.

Once we get that FDA designation, we're gonna be one of the first systems in line to be able to provide those treatments to our patients.

- Tell folks outside the clinical world who may understand it differently, why this is so important in your view.

- Listen, when we talk about these health conditions, we're in the one field in medicine where the more acute the illness, the more limited treatment options that are available.

So you've got people suffering from treatment resistant depression, and very few tools available to our psychiatrist and our clinical team to try to tackle that illness.

Psychedelics is a potential tool that could be available to us.

And so I think we've got a moral obligation as an industry to get in line and make sure that whatever these treatments are gonna be, whether it's psychedelics or some other treatment that's coming down the pike, that we put ourselves in that position so that we're first in line so we can help our patients out.

- Kenneth Esser Jr. Executive Vice President of Behavioral Health at HMH and president of HMH's Carrier Clinic.

Ken, good to see you, my friend.

- Steve, great seeing you.

Thanks so much.

- You got it.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

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