Showing posts with label NY Times editorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NY Times editorial. Show all posts

Sunday, June 3, 2018

The New York Times - Steers Mental Health Conversation In the Wrong Direction






An editorial came out today in the New York Times entitled The Crazy Talk About Bringing Back Asylums.  They took a line from President Trump that the Parkland shootings could have prevented if there were more psychiatric beds.  I am  sure was intended to temper any anti-gun sentiment rather than suggest the need for reform of mental health services, but the editorial suggests that this triggered a new debate about the need for asylum beds and looks at (on the negative side) a caricatured extreme view of increased bed capacity.  This political approach to mental health care is exactly what is wrong with policy for the past three decades.

The first mistake in the article is the following sentence:

"Psychiatric facilities are unlikely to prevent crimes similar to the Parkland shooting because people are typically not committed until after a serious incident."

Any acute care psychiatrist can attest to the fact that this is incorrect.  A considerable amount of mayhem, violence and aggression is prevented by the availability of both acute care inpatient beds and psychiatrists treating potentially aggressive people in both inpatient and outpatient settings.  There are no controlled studies of the problem because they would be unethical.  You can't randomly assign homicidal or suicidal people to placebo treatments.  They all have to be actively treated.  At times courts release people who have threatened suicide, violence or homicide without treatment for the associated mental illness and they go on to complete exactly what they said they were going to do.  At other times patients will say that they are very satisfied that they were treated because they recognized they were irrational and about to commit an irreversible act.  The clearest example is the person who is aggressive form the time of admission and the aggression does not abate until they have been actively treated for several days.  People are committed on the basis of all of these scenarios and before serious incidents occur.

Instead of Bring back the asylums they thought they would attempt other slogans to "steer the conversation" presumably about improving the care of mental illnesses in the United States.

1. Demand sensible commitment standards:  

There are essentially just three commitment standards:  dangerousness to self (or suicide potential), dangerousness to others (or aggression and in some cases homicide potential), and grave disability (or an inability to care for oneself).  What could be more sensible?  The problem is that the law is subjective and there is always a way around sensibility.  That workaround could involve a highly aggressive defense attorney with a goal to get the patient "off" rather than worry about any consequences. It could involve a number of administrative issues like the cost of civil commitment (obviously cheaper to not try) or an arbitrary decision by a hospital or court administrator that there are just "too many commitments" and it is time to roll them back- at least until the next adverse outcome.  Another common way around commitment is just to ignore the grave disability standard and in effect say commitment will occur only for dangerousness. If someone really wants to split hairs - the dangerousness has to be "imminent" and it can always be not imminent enough.  For commitment standards to have any meaning at all - they have to be implemented by sensible people.  We need to demand sensible people. More importantly there needs to be accountability and available data from commitment courts on outcomes.

The other part of the problem is that psychiatric beds are so rationed that in order to get into one - managed care organizations say that you need to be dangerous in order to get admitted.  That creates a false burden on court systems who may not be sensible about commitment in the first place.  In the context of this demand they are even less sensible.     

2.  Create a continuum of care:

The NYTimes takes a historical approach going back to the Kennedy era and the deinstitutionalization argument.  First of all there are places that have a continuum of care. The community psychiatry movement was highly successful in following people outside of state hospitals and supporting them in independent living.  Some cities like Madison, WI have a large community mental health center as well as several assertive community treatment (ACT) teams that follow people with serious mental illnesses.

The reason why there is no followup similar to medical and surgical patients with significant disabilities is several fold.  Rationing by the insurance industry and federal and state governments is the primary cause.  It is easy to save money by denying equivalent care to the mentally ill and people with severe addictions.  Over time this has led to separate acute care services in some community hospitals and long term care facilities that are typically run by the state. The large majority of hospitals in most states do not provide acute psychiatric care.  Both acute care and state systems are rationed to provide as little care as possible. It is currently in the financial interest of every managed care and insurance company in the country to maintain this fragmented system of care because it saves them all money.  In the meantime disproportionate amounts of money and resources are funneled to very other type of specialty care.

At the state level, the bed situation is so dire or nonexistent in state hospitals that it should be very clear that they have adopted the managed care rationing plan to eliminate care for the mentally ill.  That is the reason that jails are the defacto psychiatric hospitals at this time.  There is of course no standard for psychiatric care in jails and most people tell me they do not get their prescribed medications.  This is also the reason why asylum care does not work.  Asylums were basically buildings that were poorly managed by the state.

3. Stand up for insurance parity:  

Parity is a joke.  Insurance industry rationing and micromanagement of mental health treatment has continued unabated since the passage of the  Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act.  After watching professional organizations and  mental health advocacy organizations patting themselves on the back after this legislation was passed - it has been more than a little depressing for psychiatrists on the front lines to watch as the denials of care are unchanged from before the bill.  Those organizations have been standing up for parity and against stigma for about 20 years with no results.

It is difficult to get parity when most states have an insurance industry friendly complaint system and the physicians who want to complain are either employees of a managed care company or limited by confidentiality laws.  Standing up for parity is meaningless symbolism at this point. It doesn't require a complicated HHS investigation.  What is needed is a review panel in every state - staffed by psychiatrists who have no financial conflicts with the insurance companies being complained about.  The precedent for those review panels was the Peer Review Organization (PRO) panels that were set up to review all Medicare financed care in the 1980s and 1990s. There is no reason why those reviews should occur today.  The only really effective alternative has been an activist attorney general ordering some of these companies to correct egregious denials of care.  Activist attorney generals do not occur frequently enough to make a sustained difference.

The larger problem is the way that healthcare is funded in the USA. I will add an illustrative post later in the week, but the percentage of the health care dollar dedicated to the treatment of mental illness is at an all time low.  The Hay Report of the 1990s documented the disproportionate drop in health care funding and it seems that governments and insurance companies expect it to stay at that level.

The NYTimes says that all it will take is a "collective will and a decency to act".  Are they serious?  Isn't that all it will take to end mass shootings in public schools?  This is just another naive approach to public policy written by people with no expertise who are ignoring the political landscape.  It is fashionable to call those people stakeholders these days.

As usual the real stakeholders - people with mental illness, their families, and psychiatrists are left out.  The suggested slogans are as problematic as the one about bringing back asylums that the NYTimes was concerned about.


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA



Supplementary:

For detailed information about this problem go to the pinned Tweet at the top of this feed and all of the links.


References:

1.  The New York Times Editorial Board.  The Crazy Talk About Bringing Back Asylums.  New York Times June 2, 2018.


Graphics:

Kodachrome slide shot by me in 1982 of Milwaukee County Hospital.  Not an asylum but it looked like one.


           

       

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Violence and Voices

One of my colleagues posted this NYTimes  reference to my Facebook feed this morning.  It is written by anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann.  She has a number of references in Medline relevant to this article.  Her basic thesis is that violent or aggressive auditory hallucinations experienced by people with psychotic disorders are culturally determined.  She concludes with the irony that the cultural factors responsible for a lack of will to initiate any meaningful gun control measures may be responsible for more violent auditory hallucinations than are experienced in other cultures.

What is the evidence?  She sites a cross cultural study of 40 people with schizophrenia in India and the United States.  Across cultures the horrible voice in India were focused on sexual themes and in the US they were focused more on aggression and torture.  There were other directive voices focused on routine directions.  Not a lot of detail.  As a guy who has talked with hundreds of people who were experiencing voices - the common ones are basically background noise like people mumbling or talking at a volume that cannot be understood.  Clearer voices clearly comment on the person experiencing them.  The comments can vary from routine such as what the person is doing to very negative commentary or ridiculing them.  At the extremes voices tell people to harm themselves or others or commit suicide.  Those are the typical voices that psychiatrists are trained to ask about for the purpose of assessing dangerousness, but recent studies show that they are probably poor predictors of actual violent acts in clinical settings.

What about the larger observation that voices would incorporate culturally relevant elements?  It seems to me that would be a given.  As I considered the problem I recalled reading J. Allan Hobson's book The Dreaming Brain when it first came out. He describes acquiring the dream journal of the Engine Man who recorded his dreams in great detail and without interpretation in 1939.  The Engine Man was "fascinated by railway trains" and the content of his dreams that he describes and draws contains a lot of that subject material.  Railway trains were the technology of the day.  They were part of the culture and the conscious states of me interested in technology.  Like the Engine Man it is difficult to conceive of a person experiencing voices or delusions without a cultural context.





































It is difficult to imagine scenarios that lead to voices de novo without exposure to a plausible or even science fiction origin.  Hence the common scenario that there is an agency projecting these voices as the most likely cause.  It can also imply motivation for the perceptual changes as well as the content.   I doubt that voices originating as a beam from the police, the CIA, the FBI or Homeland Security occurred before these agencies were invented.

The other association I had is the theory (or axiom) that the prognosis of schizophrenia is much better in the developing world.  This idea came about as the result of a number of World Health Organization Studies and others done in the 1970s to 2000s.  Those studies suggest a better prognosis for schizophrenia in the developing world.  That theory has been called into question based on methodological considerations by Cohen et al.  At the anthropological level, the argument by Dr. Luhrmann reminds me of a similar argument about whether or not primitive peoples were inherently peaceful and became aggressive only after being influenced by social organization.  Large scale warfare only becomes possible as the institutions of civilized society grow.  Primitive man by nature was inherently peaceful and would get involved only in small scale conflicts around issues like marriage and property.  Kealy refers to this as the Myth of the Peaceful Savage.  He dispels that myth in his book War Before Civilization and points out that prehistoric man was as aggressive and violent as modern man.  Violent and aggressive solutions appear to be universal and it is likely that the culture in America is no more violent than what people experience across the world.  The only plausible cultural argument that is rapidly vanishing is the exposure to media violence on a 24/7 basis.  At anthropological level, the basic question seems to be why all human societies seem to regard warfare and aggression as an ultimate solution to unresolved conflict.

The larger issue of course is the fact that the experience of hearing voices is much more than that.  The entire conscious state is affected.  There is not a linear sequence of events that proceeds form a voice to an action.  Practically everyone with that experience has a substantial change in their conscious state.  The usual stream of consciousness is affected as well as mood state and decision making biases.  At times that is detected there can be what appears to be a complete change in the personality of the affected person.  The decisions that they currently make cannot be predicted by your past experience with them.

There are several psychotherapeutic approaches to the problem.  From a psychiatrist's perspective is is generally necessary and advisable to discuss the voices at some level with the patient.  An explanation is necessary that is more than an incomplete biological one as: "You are hearing voices - take this medication and it will get rid of them."  Most people are interested in what it means and culturally and individually based meanings are often useful.  Some of the preliminary cognitive behavioral therapy of hallucinations emphasizes the need to decrease personal meaning and when that occurs the voices may become less intense and disappear.  It should really come as no surprise that talking about voices in certain ways modifies the experience of hearing them or even results in them disappearing.  I would liken it to making a conscious decision to wake up during a dream that you don't want to have and then realizing that the dream is gone.  Although it has not been investigated I would speculate that this ability would be proportional to the degree that a person's usual conscious state has been affected.


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Hobson JA.  The Dreaming Brain.  Basic Books, Inc.  New York, 1988.

TM Luhrmann.  The Violence in Our Heads.  New York Times September 19, 2013.

Cohen A, Patel V, Thara R, Gureje O. Questioning an axiom: better prognosis for schizophrenia in the developing world? Schizophr Bull. 2008 Mar;34(2):229-44. Epub 2007 Sep 28. Review. PubMed PMID: 17905787; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2632419.

Kleinman A. Commentary on Alex Cohen et al: "Questioning an axiom: better prognosis for schizophrenia in the developing world". Schizophr Bull. 2008 Mar;34(2):249-50. Epub 2007 Dec 3. PubMed PMID: 18056682; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2632393.

Keeley LH.  War Before Civilization - The Myth of the Peaceful Savage.  Oxford University Press, 1996.