Clinicians have an ethical imperative to present ourselves in a healthy state when we offer to help patients. With the variety of wellness steps available for us to utilize, we can reduce the effect that stress, burnout, and more serious health problems have on treatment outcomes.

Mental illness is not a distant problem afflicting a few others we seldom encounter; it is endemic to human beings. When we think of mental illness and disorders we must think of self as much as non-self, and more fully address our own mental health by honestly accepting that, at times, we ourselves may need professional help with symptoms or dysfunction.

Allowing ageism to go unnoticed and unchallenged leads to internalization of this bias, and ultimately affects our view of ourselves, our outlook, our own cognitive performance, and our life expectancy.

Clinicians must not assume the "treatment resistant" (TR) concept matches a concrete reality; there are myriad causes of treatment failure, each unlikely to be the same as many other cases. We must cease using this TR label and improve our problem-solving skills in order to discover and provide better clinical outcomes.

Effective translational medicine requires ongoing dynamic, multidimensional clinical assessments of each patient that modify treatments as needed to effectively utilize new knowledge.

In psychiatry, 20%-60% of all cases are labeled "treatment resistant". Psychiatrists should view treatment failure as a stage from which eventual remission is expected rather than applying treatment resistant as an endpoint and unsanctioned diagnosis.

“Thinking about how we think” helps develop a logical progression of treatment options and increases our chances of success, rather than unconsciously submitting to the irrational distortions of probability that our minds are prone to rely on.

According to some estimates, about 20% to 60% of psychiatric diagnoses eventually become labeled “treatment resistant,” yet psychiatry seems to lack a consensus on what “treatment resistance” means, including clear criteria, H. Paul Putman III, MD, told Psychiatric Times in an exclusive interview.

The conceptual error we make is confusing treatment resistance with treatment failure. Relabeling a diagnosis as treatment resistant represents a failure of clinical problem-solving when second opinions identify remaining treatment options for more than two-thirds of these patients.

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