I read an elegant editorial piece during breakfast this morning. It was in the regular section in JAMA called "A Piece Of My Mind". Amanda Fantrey, MD writes about some of the insights she developed as a family member in an ICU setting after her brother was involved in a motor vehicle accident and sustained a traumatic brain injury and coma. She describes the pull on doctors to make statements that offer hope and frequently diverge from the realistic medical appraisal of the situation. She describes this as "the seismic gap between what was said by staff (both physicians and nurses) and what was heard by family." A common example is the staff remembering the one patient with a miraculous recovery and bringing that up in discussions with the family as a way to give them hope. Dr. Fantrey points out the origins of this behavior as wanting to reassure a traumatized and grieving family. She gives a clear example of how this plays out in a discussion between the neurosurgical team and her parents. What seems like a grim prognosis is suddenly being moderated by qualifiers. With enough modification the initial grim prognosis becomes the expectation of recovery. She also points out that another level this is self preservation - a bias toward recalling the miracle cases and saves. That without it practicing medicine and surgery is just too grim to contemplate. This is an excellent essay that I would recommend to any medical student or resident as an example of the power of affective communication, language, and interpersonal dynamics.
The interactions that Dr. Fantrey describes on medicine are common. I think they form the basis for a number of commonly observed phenomenon. Psychiatric practice is no exception. The first thing that came to mind is the promise of the miracle drug that will take away all of your problems. Many psychiatrists witness first hand patients who explicitly ask them for this kind of medication. Many people become addicted to opioids because at the outset - it seems like these medications have the properties of an ideal medication. There has been abundant criticism that new medications are oversold both by advertising and the way that advertising affects the pharmacology literature. I am much less certain of that as there is more evidence accumulating that the pricing power of the companies themselves is the single largest factor driving much higher pharmaceutical prices and profits in the US. There is the inescapable sense of hope being conveyed through both direct-to-consumer advertising and and the novelty of a new drug. Although it has not been adequately tested, that new drug is a form of hope in a pill. The interested people are all hoping for better therapeutic effects even in spite of the rapid delivery of a list of serious side effects "including death" at the very end of the commercial.
It also brought to mind some of the serious discussions that psychiatrists have with patients and how the biases might be a little different. The most obvious one is lithium. Lithium is one of the best medications in terms of therapeutic effects that psychiatrists prescribe. The attitude of other physicians seems to be: "We will let them prescribe that medication almost exclusively" or "You psychiatrists sure do prescribe a lot of toxic medications." Treating people with the most severe forms of mental illness almost exclusively for 30 years has caused me to witness many miracles of lithium therapy. The commonest was the depressed bipolar patient not able to eat, barely taking in fluids, and certainly not able to function outside of a hospital setting. After starting lithium, many of of these folks recover enough function within a week to be up in the daytime, eating and starting to care for themselves. For me the miracle of lithium has been on the depressed side. People who have failed antidepressants and whatever anticonvulsant is en vogue for bipolar disorder.
There is no other medication prescribed by psychiatrists that invokes fantasies and expectations more to patients than lithium. Their expectations are generally very bad as in: "That is some serious shit - dude.. Isn't that the medicine in that song......" I have to remind people that the band was Nirvana and yes I am old enough to have watched them perform the song Lithium live on Saturday Night Live. I have to explain calmly that it is a salt and that this makes it a unique kind of medicine with fairly unique precautions but that is can be safely taken. I do point out that is if they end up taking it for decades or if they have repeated episodes of lithium toxicity - it can cause renal failure in some and the need for dialysis and renal transplantation. I know this because of my experience with end stage renal disease that was attributed to lithium by my Renal Medicine consultants and the protracted course of dialysis, in some cases delirium, and ultimately renal transplantation. I try to outline all of that, but it is hard to imagine how much information is getting through. Like Dr. Fantrey's ICU experiences, nobody is more acutely aware of needing to provide hope than a psychiatrist talking directly to a depressed bipolar patient. We are simultaneously assessing suicide risk - even in inpatient settings. Acute care psychiatrists know that this is our job. We have to keep this person alive so that they can recover.
I have to cautiously present the information on lithium as part of the informed consent discussion, but at some point I also started to include a line about lithium being a "potentially life-changing medication." I explain that the person may experience mood stability like they have never had on the endless series of antidepressants, atypical antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, various anticonvulsants and the drift toward an inaccurate schizoaffective disorder diagnosis that they have been experiencing for years or decades. I am always concerned about whether they hear the word potentially in my description. I provide them with a detailed handout on lithium and encourage them to do whatever research they would like to do on the medication and I will answer any further questions. Is this just another example of hope enacted in the countertransference, me trying to convey it to a desperate patient? It is hard to imagine that patients who view lithium as a toxin at the outset could have unrealistic expectations about the drug. Am I coloring their expectations by my description of the drug? Would it be unfair to not include that information about potentially changing their life?
I think there are problems with all complex informed consent discussions. These discussions can't be devoid of emotional content. Like the surgical patients, some people will do better and some will do worse. It is difficult to determine that ahead of time. Every patient I see needs to benefit from my experience treating other patients. And with lithium it is very good.
George Dawson, MD, DFAPA
References:
Fantry A. Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say. JAMA. 2016;315(13):1337-1338. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.18910.
