Those Evil Med Checks

Join me for a brief Clink rant over at Clinical Psychiatry News as I provide a counterpoint argument to people who think that med check practices are destroying psychiatry.

I'd like people to acknowledge that all medication management practices are not the same and that it is possible to provide good care while working in a "split treatment" or team model. With health care reform on the horizon, more practices---psychiatric and otherwise---are going to have to move to the "medical home" model and this is likely to require closer involvement with non-psychiatrist therapists. Medication management is here to stay, the team approach works, and more psychiatrists are likely to be involved in it. Psychiatry needs to adapt and it helps no one to paint all med management with the same negative brush.

Thanks for listening, I feel better.

The Racket We're Making on Clinical Psychiatry News

Are "med checks" as the mainstay of psychiatric care just a racket?  I wrote about this on our column over on Clinical Psychiatry News.  While I think that brief med checks are fine for some patients, and even all they might want, as a standard paradigm for psychiatric treatment in a one-appointment-length-for-everyone, I think this is destroying psychiatry. What do you think?


And speaking of rackets, Roy had a article up there last week on Insurance Networks and mental health parity.  Does your insurance network list psychiatrists who aren't taking new patients, who don't see outpatients, who only do research, or who are dead? 


And just in case you missed it, Clink had yet another article about maximum security prisons, federal lawsuits, and the treatment of prisoners. 

Psychiatry and Psychotherapy: We're still talking about it.

Over on PsychCentral, Dr. Ron Pies asks if psychiatry has really abandoned psychotherapy. He doesn't think so. Ron's post was inspired by Gardiner Harris' March 6th article in the New York Times that has had every psych-blogger buzzing and has made for countless undocumented shrinky conversations. Here at Shrink Rap, we didn't miss a beat.

Dr. Pies writes:

Let’s also acknowledge that the general trend reported by the Times — the diminishing use of psychotherapy by psychiatrists — is quite real. Over the past decade or so, the percentage of psychiatrists offering psychotherapy to all or most of their patients appears to have dropped. One study — very selectively cited in the Times article — found that “just 11 percent of psychiatrists provide talk therapy to all patients…”¹ This was based on a study by Mojtabai and Olfson,³ which found a decline in the number of psychiatrists who provided psychotherapy to all of their patients — from 19.1% in 1996-1997 to 10.8% in 2004-2005. The study also found that the percentage of visits involving psychotherapy declined from 44.4% in 1996-1997 to 28.9% in 2004-2005, which “…coincided with changes in reimbursement, increases in managed care, and growth in the prescription of medications.”²

But the very same study found that almost 60% of psychiatrists were providing psychotherapy to at least some of their patients. Also, the threshold for considering a session “psychotherapy” was set quite high in the Mojtabai-Olfson study: the meeting had to last 30 minutes or longer. But as my colleague Paul Summergrad MD has pointed out, common practice and standard CPT billing codes (e.g., 90805) specifically include 20-30 minute visits for psychotherapy, with or without pharmacotherapy.⁴ Furthermore, Mojtabai and Olfson acknowledged that

“Some visits likely involved use of psychotherapeutic techniques but were not classified as psychotherapy in the current analysis. Psychotherapeutic techniques can be effectively taught and used in brief medication management visits by psychiatrists and other health care providers.”³ (p.968)

This last point was totally lost in the New York Times report. When I used to see patients for “medication checks” in my private practice, I would sometimes spend more time providing supportive psychotherapy than dealing with the medication issues, if the patient’s emotional needs warranted it. (If the patient was seeing another therapist in formal psychotherapy, I would try to remain an empathic listener, while encouraging the patient to raise the issue with the therapist). Furthermore, in providing medication for some severely personality-disordered patients, it is often impossible to maintain the therapeutic alliance without understanding the patient’s self-sabotaging defenses. As Glen Gabbard MD has observed, “…psychotherapeutic skills are needed in every context in psychiatry” — including during the much-maligned 15-20 minute “med check.”⁵

The cartoon is from the Wall Street Journal, sent to me by Moviedoc.

Emotion versus Mental Illness

My favorite commenter, "Anonymous," wrote in to my Duckiness post to say that it was good I could post something totally silly without being told I need more meds. Oh, if life were that simple. And it is true that once someone has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, not only does the world question their emotions in a black & white "are you sick again?" kind of way, but patients don't trust themselves to feel for it's own sake.

If you're not sick, then being asked if you took your meds is insulting and degrading. And so I thought I'd put together some guidelines for Emotion versus Mental Illness. I'm inventing this as I go, with no evidence-based anything, so take my suggestions at your own risk.

• If you are ultra-successful, rich, brilliant, gorgeous, famous, and comfortable with your diagnosis, you may want to consider telling people you have a mental illness because it decreases stigma and people like being with the ultra-successful rich, famous, brilliant and gorgeous and won't care that you have a mental disorder. It helps even more if you're charming.

• If you're not ultra-successful, you may want to pick and choose who you tell that you've been ill and are on medications. This isn't always possible, especially if your illness is evident to others or if the presentation of your symptoms resulted in a hospitalization. It's good to tell close family members.

• If multiple people are looking at you strangely, or commenting on your behavior, or saying you need medications, you might want to at least entertain the option that you could be sick. Unfortunately, poor insight and judgment are symptoms of mania.

• Tell the people close to you not to make medication jokes. It confuses the issue if you seriously do need medication changes, and it's rude, degrading, dismissive, and disrespectful. There, I said it.

• If you want to be silly, go for it. Be silly when you're well so that being silly is part of your baseline personality and no one equates this with being out-of-character. You'll note the duck invaders did not come after me, rather they said, "There's Dinah posting yet another stupid duck post." If I'd posted about why chocolate should be outlawed and made into a controlled substance, those same duck invaders would be asking "What's wrong with Dinah?"

• Mental illnesses come as constellations of symptoms. There is no "Sending out silly duck stuff" as a symptom. People think about mania when the ducks are combined with more energy, racing thoughts, a decreased need for sleep, increased mood OR irritability, and other symptoms of mania. Know the list and if someone bothers you, say, "I posted about ducks, I do not have any other associated symptoms." Recite them if necessary. If you do have the other symptoms, refrain from posting about ducks. I don't want Posts Duck Blog Posts to show up anywhere in DSM-V and these days you just never know.

• No one controls how any other person thinks of them or judges them and it's not reasonable to live life ruled by a desire to be perceived in a certain way . It's another form of poultry, but Don't Let the Turkeys Get You Down. There are a lot of turkeys out there.

Moods happen on a spectrum. Some people have large variations in their mood---large enough or severe enough such that it causes suffering, and we call it an illness. Some people don't have much variety to their moods and live in a calm, even-keel place, and it's great that we have such people. But, I absolutely promise you that if we lived in a world where everyone had a very narrow range of mood, this would be one terribly boring planet. We should celebrate our diversity, not condemn those who like ducky stuff.

Shrink Rap: Grand Rounds is up at ACP Internist

This week's Medical Grand Rounds has some great links, including:

• Philip Hickey laments the "med-check", blaming the cozy shrink-pharma relationship;
• neurofeedback for ADHD?
• four factors of addiction
• balancing of error-reporting
• should physicians be involved in health reform?

And, Happy St. Patrick's Day!

When Will I See You Again?

In the out patient mental health clinics in Maryland, regulations make it clear: any patient on medication must be seen by a psychiatrist every 90 days, patients who are not on medications are seen by the psychiatrist every six months. This assumes the patient is stable and all is going well, and certainly some docs in some clinics see the patients more often, but a minimum is regulated.

In the world of private practice, it's less clear. If patients are in psychotherapy, it's easy enough to deal with medications during a regularly scheduled appointment. But what about the patients who are done with therapy, who feel good, who want to continue on their medication? Some patients are fine with coming in monthly, others clearly don't want to, and if things are really stable, I'm happy to see folks every three months, the standard of the clinic. There are people though, who really don't want to come in that often, where it's a hassle for them to get off work. Sometimes their pharmacies start calling for refills (--with the mail order pharmacies, this can include twice daily phone calls and repeated faxes) and there is no contact from the patient. I've taken to ignoring these calls (especially the ones from the mail order pharmacies who want okay's for a 30 month supply) if I haven't seen the patient in a long time because returning them often involves a long time in voicemail hell to convey the message, "The patient needs to call me." Patients know to call me if they are having problems, I'll get them in soon. But for someone who doesn't want to come in, who says they are fine, I'm still not sure how often to insist on face-to-face contact. Here and there someone pops up who I've long ago assumed was gone--- If someone is to call me in 3-4 months, and they don't, I don't always remember to chase them down. And when I do, sometimes they've stopped their meds, or asked their internist for a prescription.

So is there an absolute answer? Is there an absolute minimum that a patient needs to be seen for a refill? Internists prescribe for a year a a time, and so do some psychiatrists (I think). What's your thoughts?

Should Psychiatrists See Patients for Psychotherapy?

The trend is for psychiatrists to see patients for psychiatric evaluation, treatment with medications, and a medicalized version of psychiatric care, while parceling out psychotherapy to non-MD psychotherapists-- social workers, psychologists, licensed clinical counselors, nurse therapists, pastoral counselors (and anyone else who wants to listen...a bartender or two, perhaps the hair stylist).

Those readers who've been following Shrink Rap for a while know that I work in two types of outpatient settings: a community mental health center where I see people to treat their mental illnesses with medications, and a private psychotherapy practice where I use medications but I also provide psychotherapy to patients who want and need it. ClinkShrink sees patients in forensic settings (name your jail) and she sees a remarkably high volume of patients. She deals exclusively with medical issues-- patients may say or hear things that impact them positively, but the formal setting of therapy to talk, as a process over time, to resolve specific issues, to deal with past events, and to alter patterns of behavior, is not what she does. Roy has worked in many settings, but his current hat is as a Consultation-Liason psychiatrist in a large community hospital-- he mostly evaluates patients and makes treatment recommendations, but he doesn't see outpatients over long periods of time. He used to do that.

Psychiatrists (in the old days) used to see people for psychotherapy routinely, especially before medications were available. I think I was finished with medical school before I even knew that social workers saw clients for psychotherapy. I thought they met with families, worked for agencies, helped with disposition and obtaining benefits, and had a lot to do with foster children and protective services. I believed psychotherapy was the exclusive domain of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. I simply didn't know.

I've talked here before about why I think, in a totally ideal world, that it's best for patients to see one person for psychotherapy and medications: one stop shopping is more convenient, psychiatric illnesses aren't 'explained' away without the offer of medications, the doc really gets to know the patient and learns to differentiate better what is, and what is not, a symptom of illness or medication side effects, and there isn't a set-up for patients who are prone to dividing their care-takers into good guys and bad guys.

The reality of the world is that psychiatrists are the most expensive mental health professionals, and in the shortest demand. They are more expensive to train, they often finish school heavily in debt, and there aren't enough to go around. And psychiatric residency programs, for the most part, don't emphasize psychotherapy training-- the resident has to pursue it. A psychiatry resident was recently telling me about a patient who wanted insight-oriented psychotherapy and the resident said, "We just don't have time in residency to do that." For those who know they want to pursue a career in research, spending a lot of time learning to do psychotherapy may not be a wise use of limited time. Some people might go as far to say that it's wrong to have psychiatrists doing psychotherapy, especially in shortage regions where there aren't enough shrinks to go around--- a lot more patients can be seen for quick med checks than for 4 times/week psychoanalysis (-- I'm not a psychoanalyst, by the way).

I believe that people should do what suits them, given the realistic constraints of their environment. I'm even okay with the psychiatrist beauty queen. With regard to psychiatrists doing psychotherapy: I like the work and there seems to be a demand for it. I also work in a clinic where the option does not exist to do this kind of work, but it does afford me the opportunity to see a different population of patients and to work as part of a team.

(Roy made me proof read this; my first draft was a disaster.)

For The Sake Of Argument

[Subtitle: Clink Takes The Bait]

But first, Good News for those following the HBO In Treatment Sub-Blog: Post on Sophie below this: Click Here.

If I were a trout I'd be three feet out of the water by now. Dinah's post "When A Shrink Picks A Benzodiazepine" is like a bright colorful feathered fly with a tantalizing spin. I tried resisting, but I just had to leap for it.

In my clinic today two patients had benzodiazepine issues. Patient One had been taking his mother's Xanax. Patient Two had his parole violated for a dirty urine. He said he had been getting his psychiatric care through a local program, but that they had only prescribed Xanax "to help me with my marijuana problem". I asked him what they were giving him for his bipolar disorder, and he said, "Oh nothing. Between the marijuana and the Xanax I was alright." Right.

I'd like to think the outpatient doctors for both Patient One and Patient Two were both as careful as Dinah. Hopefully they both took good substance abuse histories and knew their patients well. I'm sure they were well-intentioned. Right. The problem with the approach Dinah suggests is that people with active addictions aren't going to tell you about them. They're going to conceal their substance abuse histories and lie about the pharmacies they go to. Taking a history isn't going to help too much.

So for the sake of argument (and we do like to argue here at Shrink Rap!) let's say Patient One's mother has, as Dinah suggests, a fear of flying that necessitates occasional benzodiazepine use. So nervous flying mom also has a pot-smoking son who also drinks a bit (but is smart enough to hide the empties), a son who also snorts his Ritalin. Patient One's doctor takes a history and learns nervous flying mom has never abused alcohol or been dependent on drugs. He doesn't find out about snorting, pot-smoking son because nervous flying mom is clueless. He writes a prescription for a benzodiazepine and now pot-smoking son mentally blesses him whenever he opens his mom's medicine cabinet. And I have a new parole-violating patient. And mom's doctor never has a clue this is going on.

So when I hear about free society docs who never have a problem with patients on benzodiazepines, I can't help but wonder if the problems are truly that rare or if they just never find out about them. The patients disappear when the med gets tapered (or they get arrested) and the doc never hears the end of the story.

And I wonder why, when working in a public clinic, it is "very rare" that Dinah will start benzodiazepines in that setting. I suspect it's because with those patient the substance abuse issues are a little harder to conceal, especially when they come to her freshly released from jail. Thus, addicts from low socioeconomic classes are pretty much stuck buying their stuff off the street.

So I agree with Dinah that prescribing involves a risk-benefit assessment. I just don't get the part where the risk of temporary nervousness while flying outweighs the risk of diversion, misuse, abuse and dependence. I'm still working on that part.

(Dinah and I could keep this up until people beg for more In Treatment posts. I'll try to contain myself.)

Sober Thoughts

[I'd like to thank Clinking By Proxy for helping me post while my Comcast was down. I owe you chocolate. And yes, Dinah, I'll babysit Max. He's adorable.]

I used to think that I wouldn't write about substance abuse because I wasn't an "official" substance abuse expert, at least not on paper. I didn't do an addictions fellowship and addiction per se was not usually the primary focus of treatment in my outpatient clinic. Then came my Dose Dependent post and the Benzo Wars podcast and all the subsequent comments, positive and negative, about the issue. I discovered I had a lot to say, mainly as a result of several years of direct practical experience.

Many doctors, as a rule, do not like patients with substance abuse problems. They fill up the emergency room, they suck down psychiatric resources, they fill up the psychiatric inpatient beds looking for detox or housing, they fill up the inpatient medical wards with conditions resulting from their lifestyles. They take a lot of time and work and they're not always nice people to deal with.

Those are the folks with the severe addictions, the ones that result in arrest and incarceration or homelessness and poverty. There are lots of other addicts out there whom I never see, the middle-class non-criminal addicts whose addiction touches the lives of their families and loved ones but never quite sinks to the level of the streets. These addictions are no less serious. I think I get vocal about these folks (and about things like prescription controlled substances) because I can see where things are headed. I know how bad they can get and the human wreckage that will be left along the way. I can tell you story after story about people who have never done a thing wrong in their lives until that on-the-job accident and the first opiate prescription, or that first hit of cocaine (or the first benzo prescription) and the next thing you know the wife is gone, the job is gone, the house is gone, and they're in prison. It does happen, more often than you think.

Doctors can't always tell who is or isn't an addict among these nice, educated, relatively well-heeled genteel non-criminal folks. Addiction is a hidden disease, a disease of denial, a thing that's carried in secret and buried away even from the addict. Addicts can hide their problems even from people living in the same household. Shame is a powerful motivation for secrecy. Doctors aren't soothsayers or mind readers, and taking a good history or talking to relatives won't always turn up the problem prior to writing a prescription. We want to care for people and relieve distress and a prescription is one way to do that. Unfortunately, it is also possible to create a new addiction in a person who never had one before and we have no way of knowing ahead of time which patient this will happen to. Giving a warning about addiction potential or cautions about continuous use is one way of approaching this problem, thus leaving the responsibility for the addiction back with the patient ("I warned you this could happen, I have it documented in the informed consent section of my progress note.") but this would be little comfort to me when I see these folks in prison.

When I read comments from people who say they're reluctant to take more of their prescribed controlled substance, I say: "Respect your gut." If you think it may be a problem for you, it could be. If your loved ones or doctor is encouraging you to take more and you're not comfortable with that, say so. Repeatedly if necessary. You're the one carrying both the symptoms and the addiction risk. As one of our anonymous commenters said:

"We didn't wake up one day addicted. It was one or more of your colleagues with an MD after their name who started all of this for the vast majority of us so as someone else said, why don't you take it up with them at your conferences or in professional writings or wherever it is that you all gather to talk down about us and the problem your crew created?"

That's exactly why we're blogging and podcasting about this. Thank you.

Here's When You Need A Psychiatrist

Have we written this one yet? I seem to think that Roy, our Consultation-Liason Boy, may have done this.

This is just my opinion, it's written with the non-shrink doc in mind, and it assumes access to psychiatric care:

So when should a patient be referred to a psychiatrist for care?

• When their distress due to psychiatric illness is such that they can't contain it and are driving the primary care doc nuts.
• Any patient with the new onset of a psychotic illness should initially be stabilized by a psychiatrist (this is just my opinion) if they are willing to go. Psychotic illness: any illness accompanied by hallucinations and/or delusions. Psychosis is frequently seen in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder, but can also be seen with depression, delirium, and a host of other non-psychiatric illnesses. If the patient's hallucinations are caused by a brain tumor and they resolve with removal of the brain tumor, then the psychiatrist may not be necessary. Maybe Roy can write us a "causes of psychosis" post.
• For depression: my conservative rule would be to refer after the patient fails one antidepressant medication given at a therapeutic dose for long enough. What's a therapeutic dose: I go as high as a) the patient will tolerate or b) to the highest recommended dose (which ever comes first). If a patient can't tolerate more than 50mg of zoloft, well, this isn't a full trial. Switch to another med and try to get the patient up to a full dose. Wait AT LEAST four weeks (the mantra is 3 to 6 weeks) on a good dose. It's not uncommon to get a patient who has been on small doses of many anti-depressants, none for very long. And primary care docs aren't the best at augmentation strategies.
• Any patient with Bipolar Disorder needs a psychiatrist to stabilize them, and a psychiatrist available for management of episodes. If someone has been stable on Lithium for the past 8 years, they don't need a psychiatrist to prescribe it.
• When prescribing that first antidepressant, ask every patient with depression if they've had a manic episode: "Have ever had a time when your mood was too good, when you had excessive energy and needed less sleep, when you talked faster than usual, your thoughts raced, you were more impulsive than usual with regard to spending or sex?" Anyone who doesn't look at you like you're nuts for asking this needs to be questioned in more detail about manic episodes. If the patient has a history of even one manic episode, you're dealing with Bipolar Depression and prescribing antidepressants could be very risky-- not a bad time to refer.
• Don't prescribe Xanax for a chronic anxiety disorder. It's hard to treat patients who get dependent on xanax and it's hard to refer them if they end up on high doses.
• Any patient with a recent serious suicide attempt or recent psychiatric hospitalizations should be stabilized by a psychiatrist.
• Any patient with any psychiatric disorder that is compromising their ability to function, who does not improve after two to three months of treatment, should be referred for psychiatric care-- so OCD or Panic Disorder that is not getting better quickly.
• If a psychiatric disorder puts anyone's life at risk, it's probably more than a primary care doc wants to or should deal with.
• Any patient who is being treated by a primary care doc for a psychiatric illness should be asked if they want to see a psychotherapist (a shrink or a psychologist or a social worker or a nurse therapist). The patient may say that the pills have cured their depression and they don't need to talk. In the absence of information, this should be respected. But the gentle offer of a psychotherapy referral should be made early.

Sorry, a little haphazard, maybe Roy can come in and add an addendum....

My Other Life

Don't Forget To Take Our SideBar Poll.....

I work in two different clinics where I see patients just for medication management. Though I've ranted about the wonders of seeing a single psychiatrist for psychotherapy who also can evaluate for, monitor, and adjust medications, the financial reality of the world is that this is not the cheapest way to offer care, and in a setting where 30% of the patients don't keep appointments, it's not practical to schedule a psychiatrist with hour-long therapy sessions. Many patients in clinic populations need case management, help negotiating benefits, and liaison with rehabilitative and vocational services-- things psychiatrists aren't trained to do.

I've said I don't do med checks. I lied. Or rather, when I'm blogging, I tend to think about my private practice, not the clinics. I do med checks. Do I think I'm giving a lower standard of care to people who can't afford to pay me? Yup, sometimes I do. Mostly though, I've come to terms with it because of these issues:
-- The financial reality: given the No show issue and poor reimbursement rates for medicaid and uninsured patients, I am often paid than the clinics are reimbursed.
--Chronically mentally ill patients need a lot of care coordination with other specialists, care providers, supported employment, psychosocial rehab programs-- and they all have forms that need to be filled out. Charts are kept separately and have to be hunted for. Billing issues must be done as well. These things are done best by other mental health folks or secretarial people.
-- Coordination of care and continuity of treatment work best if patients are seen at an outpatient clinic that is affiliated with an inpatient unit and partial hospitalization program.
--Split therapy works best if the psychotherapist is readily available for consultation, and in one clinic where I work, the patients see the therapists and the docs together. Private patient split therapy can be a hassle with regard to communication and with regard to who does which pieces of the patient's care.
-- Many patients I see in the clinic have no interest in psychotherapy and little inclination to offer much information about their lives. I ask about any new things going on in their lives, their sleep, their appetite, their symptoms, do they hear voices, are they suicidal? Any side effects? Are the meds working? Any new medical problems or medications? The patients don't necessarily come with an agenda for introspection.