The New York Times Editorial Board on Parity

The New York Times Editorial Board came out with a comment on mental health parity entitled Equal Coverage for the Mentally Ill.  Like most sources with no knowledge of how mental health treatment works in this country - their outlook was very rosy.  I am  sure that is what the authors of the original bill - the late Senator Paul Wellstone and Senator Pete Domenici were hoping for.  Let me tell you why that is not going to happen.  As I followed the link to who is actually on the Editorial Board it is probably significant that there is nobody with health care expertise.  Even if there was the national press has a naive approach to health care and seems to present a distinctly politicized and business friendly viewpoint.  I would generally characterize that as a view that is very short on quality and long on cost effectiveness rhetoric.  The press seems to uncritically accept that "high quality cost effective" health care is the goal of businesses and governments.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The actual Rule that was published yesterday is a 205 page document.  It is written in a style that defies comprehension by anyone who is not a Congressional insider or an attorney.  Despite being highly acclaimed by a number of organizations including the American Psychiatric Association (APA) there is a surprising lack of details in why this is some sort of advance.  I go into this with thirty years of experience battling managed care in its various forms and needless to say I am no friend to that approach.  I know that the real goal is for managed care companies to make money and they make money by denying care and providing low quality care.  I also know that governments at all levels are very friendly to the managed care cartel and have bought their theology.  Practically all health care legislation is managed care friendly and the PPACA (Obamacare) facilitates super managed care organizations called Accountable Care Organizations.  With that backdrop and realizing that like most other people, I lack the legal qualifications to read this document, here are a few of my impressions:

1.  Medical necessity - there are 44 references to medical necessity in the document.  There is some concern about transparency.  It is quite easy for a managed care company to tell a person or their physician, pharmacy, or hospital that they are not covering a service because it is not "medically necessary."  This generally means that the company can employ doctors who can arbitrarily deny services.  In Minnesota in the 1990s, several psychiatrists were concerned that these companies were discharging people from hospitals prematurely and they insisted on seeing the actual criteria for these decisions.  They were advised that they were "proprietary" and not available.  The new Rule seems to demand adequate disclosure of these criteria.  Even if it did, the disclosure of this information is irrelevant.  In fact, there are criteria in use right now that are essentially made up on financial information and they have nothing to do with psychiatric treatment.  Unless there is an actual appeal process to a neutral party who has the power to overturn these decisions, managed care companies will continue to do whatever they want.

2.  Utilization review - there is one reference to utilization review (UR), a managed care tactic that is basically designed to harass physicians into discharging patients from a hospital based on the financial demands of the managed care company.  An example would be serial calls to a physician treating a patient with suicidal ideation.  The attending physician who sees the patient every day is concerned that the patient has a significant suicide risk and wants to continue to treat them on an inpatient basis.  The reviewer who is an employee of the managed care company, is sitting in a room several states away, and has never seen the patient and has no professional responsibility to them decides the patient is not at high risk and that they should be discharged from the hospital.  This leads to a series of unproductive conversations and forces the physician working with the patient to call him every day to justify keeping the patient in the hospital.  In many ways dealing with this process is like dealing with a bill collector.  The only difference is that you are paying a penalty for doing  your work and being responsible to a patient.

The rule seems to suggest that the amount of UR done is not a problem as long as it is equally applied across both mental health and general medical surgical services.  There are major problems with that idea.  The first is a decade long initiative by the managed care industry to internalize utilization review by case managers.  They claim these case managers are part of some kind of imaginary patient care team.   In fact they are there applying business standards to force physicians to discharge patients.  The second problem is that UR is completely unnecessary.  Managed care companies have huge financial leverage.  They reimburse a set amount per admission/discharge diagnosis that is a discounted rate.  The only conceivable uses for UR today are to pressure inpatient physicians and to create an incentive through internal UR to increase profits by managing discounted rates.  That happens when a hospital receives a fixed payment for what is probably a 5 day hospitalization and they now have UR by case managers to get physicians to discharge these patients in 3 days instead of 5.  There is no major psychiatric condition requiring hospitalization that  responds to three days of treatment.

3.  Small employer exemption - the Mental Health Parity And Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) does not apply to small employers:

 "MHPAEA and the regulations under it do not apply to employers with 50 or fewer employees (although, separately, the EHB regulations adopt MHPAEA)."   

According to the Census that eliminates about 34 million people or about the same number of uninsured that the PPACA purports to cover for the first time.  It also defeats the concept of parity.  But it turns out there are a lot of exceptions.  So who knows the total number of people who will be not even be covered:

"MHPAEA requirements do not apply to:

• Non-Federal governmental plans that have 100 or fewer  employees;
• Small private employers who have 50 or fewer employees;
• Large group health plans that are exempt from MHPAEA based on their increased cost.  Large group health plan sponsors that make changes to comply with MHPAEA and incur an increased cost of at least two percent in the first year that MHPAEA applies to the plan (the first plan year beginning after October 3, 2009) or at least one percent in any subsequent plan year (generally, plan years beginning after October 3, 2010) may apply for an exemption from MHPAEA based on their increased cost. If such a cost is incurred, the plan is exempt from MHPAEA requirements for the plan year following the year the cost was incurred. Subsequently, the plan sponsors must notify the plan beneficiaries that MHPAEA does not apply to their coverage.  These exemptions last one year. After that, the plan is required to comply again; however, if the plan incurs an increased cost of at least one percent in that plan year, the plan could claim the exemption for the following plan year. The following set of FAQ’s provide additional information related to the application of MHPAEA. In particular, see Q. 11 for a discussion of the processes by which plans may claim a cost exemptionhttp://cms.gov/cciio/resources/factsheets/aca_implementation_faqs5.html); and
• Self-funded non-Federal governmental employers that opt-out of the requirements of MHPAEA.  Non-Federal governmental employers that provide self-funded group health plan coverage to their employees (coverage that is not provided through an insurer) may elect to exempt their plan (opt-out) from the requirements of MHPAEA by following the Procedures & Requirements for HIPAA Exemption Election posted on the Self-Funded Non-Federal Governmental Plans webpage (Seehttp://cms.gov/cciio/resources/files/hipaa_exemption_election_instructions_04072011.html), then issuing a notice of opt-out to enrollees at the time of enrollment and on an annual basis. Thereafter, the employer must also file the opt-out notification with CMS"

4.  This bill will have no impact on gun violence.  You can't assess and treat potentially violent and aggressive people in a rationed, low quality system of care that is run by case managers bent on getting people out of the hospital.  There are many better suggestions on this blog but they require a system of quality care and professionalism.

5.  The bill will not save any money.  It should be painfully apparent that delegating the management of health care in the United States to a profit motivated middleman is a recipe for health care inflation.  That point is routinely lost on politicians and journalists.  The other point that these folks never seem to get is that managed care companies have in many cases acquired the means of production that they had sought to control.  This creates an additional conflict of interest.  If you now own all of the MRI scanners, you have an interest in seeing them run 24/7 especially when they might be covering a significant part of your hospital costs.  That might explain what an MRI of the C-spine is $1,500 in the US and $150 in Japan.

6.  The rule is doomed if the Editorial Board is serious about it depending on enforcement by state insurance commissioners.  The members of the Board must not have ever filed a complaint with a state insurance commission.  In many states it is difficult to find the state agency responsible for taking complaints against managed care companies.  Unlike Medical Boards, insurance complaints are often a well kept secret.  There are often pro-insurance and pro-managed care statutes in state law and industry insiders on the commission.  In my experience, the only hope state residents have against the managed care industry is an activist Attorney General.  Activist AGs happen about once a decade.    

These are all huge deficiencies in a Rule that is supposed to assure parity between mental health and substance use disorders and general medical surgical treatment.  Combined with pressure for collaborative care in primary care clinics, it is very easy to imagine that this Rule will not make any difference at all.  That is my preliminary take on the Rule with my previously stated qualifiers.

I fully expect a business friendly government to continue to be an obstacle to the provision of quality mental health and addiction services largely due to the conflict of interest it creates when it uses private businesses to make money by denying care at several levels.  But the New York Times won't be telling you that.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Final Rule on Mental Health Parity.  Federal Register.  November 13, 2013.

Abstract Art

When I was a kid in a small town we had the same art teacher for the first eight years.  There were five elementary schools and Mr. Cooper would travel to all five schools and try to teach us art.  I just recently learned that he also taught art in the same way in elementary schools in the surrounding small towns.  When I went to junior high school I was surprised to see him in the 7th and 8th grade teaching in an old art deco building on the high school campus (my high school was grades 7-12).

The format in his classes was generally the same.  He would spend the first 10-15 minutes talking about art - usually a specific artist or groups of artists, or a technique.  A couple of times a year he would bring in a large orthographic projector that would allow him to project pictures from art books onto a movie screen.   He would typically turn us loose for the last 45 minutes using a specific technique.  During that time he would walk around and make comments on what we were doing and make suggestions on how to improve our art.  Mr. Cooper was very serious and talked with us in a serious manner even though we were kids.  He was serious about art.

The most memorable sessions for me involved finger painting.  That day we would all get a blank piece of white paper.  Mr. Cooper would walk around and place a dollop of thinned wheat paste onto the paper and tell us to spread it around.  He would them come around and place red, blue, green, and yellow powdered paint on the corners of the paper - several tablespoons of each.  For a class of 20-30 kids it takes a while to set all of that up.  Before he could get back up in front of the class, 90% of the kids were already smearing the paint around and 98% of them had smeared it all together.  The standard mix resulted in a lavender clay colored product.  When that happens you are limited to geometry - whatever lines or shapes you could put into the surface.  The few people who keep their colors separate - had many options based on the primary color options and combinations of those colors.  I have never thought about it before but this is a science intersection of sorts - more degrees of freedom or combinations from the basic step of not mixing all of your paint together.

I was one of the people who never mixed the colors together.  I liked the boundaries between bright colors and the areas of pure bright colors.  I liked the non geometric shapes stretched across the paper through numerous color zones.  There was something very satisfying about creating a painting from this simple technique.  At the same time, we were presented with art work by the masters.  We saw plenty of meticulous realistic art from the masters of several eras.  Even then it seemed like many had an abstract quality.  I can remember liking Edward Hopper's work at first sight.  This Andrew Wyeth image had the same effect.  Over the past 40 years, I have studied art where I could find it but I always gravitate to the abstract.  If I have a choice it is typically color field artists like Hans Hoffman, but any abstract artist will do.  I used to tell myself that I would start painting again in my spare time, but practicing medicine these days is not conducive to spare time or doing anything creative during it.  My wife and I do have time to appreciate local abstract artists and purchase some of our favorite pieces like the work of Steve Capiz below (click to enlarge):

    
The artist in this case has been painting abstracts for 50 years and he is still going strong.  He is currently painting very large canvasses on the order of 6-10 feet high and wide.  The last time I was in his gallery there were probably 40 - 50 paintings on sale and I honed in on exactly two of them including the one above.  If you walk into my house you will find the above 36" x 36" painting to the right of the entrance and as you look across the room to the left there is a 48" x 48" abstract above a fireplace in your line of sight.  If you look down the stairwell there is a large print - Morris Louis #2703.  There are four other paintings by Steve Capiz throughout the house.

The reaction to abstract art is always interesting.  When I post some of the art on my Facebook page, friends often comment on what the painting looks like.  It seems like a projective test.  My wife takes the interior design approach.  The colors of the painting need to "pull together" the colors in the room.  Our painter wears a T-shirt that says: "Don't buy art to match the furniture."  He encourages my wife to listen to me when it comes to abstract art.  But I am really not aware of why I love abstract art and why I can discriminate enough to select 2/50 paintings from my favorite artist.  Did it have something to do with my fingerpainting experience?  Or is my brain set up to fingerpaint in a certain way and be attracted to abstract art?  My life experience has certainly been broadened by art.  I have no idea how it has affected my thinking.  Some of those details are known for musical performance.  Learning to play the cello and clarinet has probably led to some enduring changes in my brain plasticity.

Experiments aside - I am glad I met Mr. Cooper when I was a kid.  It has been my experience that you never know enough at the time to optimize your experience with good teachers.  That is as true for art as it was for neuroanatomy.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Accountability - The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

On April 7, 1775, Samuel Johnson said:  "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."  His biographer had to clarify that Dr. Johnson was not talking about love of country but "pretend patriotism which so many have made a cloak for self interest".  We see the rhetorical application in American elections where politicians spend more time on discussions of their military records rather than issues relevant to any kind of plan that they have for the nation or solving any real problems.  Nunberg makes the observation that that the term can also mean an irrational bias favoring one's country and that Americans have applied the term indiscriminately at times. He also points out that it can be a word designed to put people on the defensive.  

If I had to pick a word in the medical field that has similar uses - it would be "accountability".  There has probably been no single word more responsible for facilitating managed care and recent government intrusions into the practice of medicine.  If you think about the premise of physicians being "accountable" to politicians and businesses - it is absurd on the face of it.  Taking a professional who has been trained to be accountable to an individual patient and who operates in a professional environment that specifies behavior toward that person and telling them that they are now going to be monitored by businesses with a goal of maximizing profits or politicians with numerous conflicts of interest and a clear interest in getting re-elected - is an ongoing disaster.  So  how has it happened?  I would suggest that most of it has to do with rhetoric.

Before I point out the medical applications of the accountability rhetoric let me say that I don't consider this to be specifically applied to medicine.  Accountability rhetoric is broadly applied by any person or group seeking some kind of political advantage.  An obvious example is education and teaching.  Politicians everywhere get a lot of mileage out of the idea that they are going to hold teachers accountable usually through standardized test scores.  It has become a pat answer to taxpayers concerns about the money being spent on education and low graduation rates.  In some states, the test scores are marched out every year and used to rank schools and teachers.  Never mind the fact that the school system that produces the top international performance scores does not work that way.  In Finland, a professional teaching culture is by far and away the most significant factor in their academic excellence.  In the book written about this the teachers say they would not tolerate the kinds of intrusions that are common in the United States.  These intrusions are all based on accountability rhetoric.  

In preparing for this post, I searched my e-mails from the past three years and found 1800 e-mails containing the word accountability.  Most of those hits were due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  If you read the long title of this act it was clearly doomed out of the box.  The major impetus for the PPACA (Obamacare) was health insurance portability suggesting that HIPPA was already a failure.  That did not deter legislators from including a Privacy Rule under HIPAA to supposedly crack down on privacy violations.  My read of the bill is that is actually broadens the use of anyone's medical information among all "covered entities" affiliated with your health plan.  In the meantime,  the Privacy Rule was so threatening that it almost immediately made it more difficult for the doctors doing the work to get access to data.  Was it necessary for physicians?  Absolutely not - physicians are trained in medical privacy and all broad breaches of medical privacy have been due to either hacking or business people losing computers with significant amounts of data.  Make no mistake about it - politicians will be there to make the most accountable people accountable and greatly decrease their efficiency.   A great example of the title of this post.

I have recently posted a number of examples of accountability rhetoric being used for political leverage against physicians.   It can be used by medical boards, advocacy organizations, state agencies, federal agencies, and specialty boards in addition to politicians.  I am going to focus on a single example and that is Medicare.  All of the information that follows is public and can be accessed through the Medicare link on the American Psychiatric Association's web site.  I picked it up on my Facebook feed but it disappeared and I had to call APA staff to figure out where it went.  I am very familiar with the history of Medicare quality initiatives because I was one of their quality reviewers for inpatient hospitalizations in Minnesota and Wisconsin in the late 1980s and 1990s.  If you look for inpatient psychiatry measures you will find that many of them (polypharmacy, multiple drugs from the same class, discharge planning) are unchanged from that era, despite the fact that the review organization was disbanded because it did not find enough quality or utilization problems to justify its ongoing existence.

The APA points out that Medicare now has a fee scale that takes into account "quality of care measures instead of just paying a standard fee for every procedure (CPT) code".  They have a Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) that requires psychiatrists to report on one measure in order to avoid a 1.5% penalty.  For 2013 that report has to be made on one Medicare patient.  This is described as an "incentive" to report on quality performance measures and of course a "penalty" for those who fail to report.   A managed care company would call it a "holdback" in that it is technically work that has been done, but the no cost way to turn it into an "incentive" is just to take it from the people doing the work and make it seem like they are rewarded with it later.

The document goes on to document "measures identified as pertinent to psychiatrists (along with their designated codes)".  If you are a psychiatrist read through these reporting measures and marvel at the morass of initial codes that I am sure are going to grow as this administrative nightmare continues.  The further problem is that Medicare/CMS clearly has the goal of comparing physicians and holding them accountable based on the fantasy that these measures actually mean something in clinical practice or even the world.  And if this list of measures is not enough, there are also 50+ page guidelines online like: "The American Medical Association-convened Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement - Adult Major Depressive Disorder Performance Measurement Set" that describes an additional set of performance measures.  The AMA is involved and if you click the link 2013 PQRS Quality Measures you can search on Major Depressive Disorder and find the following links.  You can download the 50+ page document from the top link.

Most people realize that physicians currently have some of the highest burnout rates of any group of professionals.  Those burnout rates are directly related to micromanagement even before we get to the level I just described in the above paragraphs.  The paradox that every physician is aware of is that these reportable measures are not valid objective markers and they are being promoted by bureaucrats who not only have no accountability but in the case of the mental health system of care are some of the same people who destroyed it in the first place.  Don't forget that Congress skewed insurance coverage of mental illness and addictions so badly that Senators Wellstone and Domenici had to write legislation in an attempt to correct that.  At this time the final form of their legislation is still pending.

So accountability has become the last refuge of scoundrels.  Be very skeptical of any politician or bureaucrat waving that flag.  It has little to do with reality and more to do with promoting their own self interests while creating a tremendous and unnecessary burden for the doctors they regulate.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Nunberg G.  Going Nucular: language, politics, and culture in confrontational times.  Cambridge: MA Perseus Books Group, 2004.

For a complete analysis of political doublespeak as applied to medicine see:

Robert W. Geist:  Hot Air Index: Political/Commercial Double-speak Lexicon for Medicine

Sleeping Cleans Your Brain

Why we need sleep and what happens during that process is an area of great interest for both the basic and clinical neurosciences. I recall listening to a lecture by Giulio Tononi at the 75th Anniversary of the University of Wisconsin's Department of Psychiatry on a theory of how synapses were processed during sleep in order to renew the brain's learning capacity for the next day.

I encountered a fascinating paper in this week's Science magazine on a possible sleep function that I have never seen described before - flushing toxins out of the brain.  The lead author hails from the Division of Glial Disease and Therapeutics, Center for Translational Neuromedicine, Department of Neurosurgery, University of Rochester Medical School.  That probably says a lot about the focus of the paper and that is the movement of interstitial fluid (ISF) as it circulates through the interstitial spaces around neurons and removes toxic waste products including β-amyloid (Aβ)  Since the brain lacks a lymphatic system convective exchange between CSF and ISF controls this turnover.  One author named the system the glymphatic system since the system is dependent on astrocytic aquaporin-4 (APQ-4) channels for establishing the  convective movement of ISF and this is homologous to peripheral lymphatic movement and removal of toxic byproducts from peripheral tissue by the lymphatic system.  The authors also note that the observation that (Aβ)  protein has been observed to be at a higher concentration in the daytime as opposed to during sleep.  To explain this one hypothesis was that production was greater in the daytime.  They tested the alternate hypothesis that glymphatic clearance is greater at night.

The basic experiment for the paper involved teaching mice to sleep on a two-photon microscope.  That allows imaging of dye moving through living tissue.  The researcher would inject mice with  green dye at sleep onset and red dye upon awakening.  They could determine that during sleep a much higher volume or CSF flowed through the brain.  They also injected labelled (Aβ)  protein and showed that the brain of a sleeping mouse cleared these proteins twice as fast.  The art below shows the experiment and the 60% increase in channels carrying CSF during sleep.  I would encourage anyone interested to read the original in color as Science has outstanding graphics.  To download my original PowerPoint slide use this link.

The authors went on to demonstrate that the increase in interstitial space was a sleep related phenomenon because it could be induced by natural sleep and anesthesia but not circadian rhythm.  In looking for a mechanism they postulated that adrenergic mechanisms associated with arousal like locus ceruleus derived noradrenergic signaling was involved.  They demonstrated that adrenergic antagonists could induce the expected increase in tracer influx and interstitial volume so that it was similar to what was seen in the sleep state. 

Implications for psychiatry?  To some extent, those of us interested in neuroscience and not forgetting what we learned in PChem will always be interested in article at the interface between the biochemical and the biophysical.  Despite having this elegant system coupled with our arousal state and metabolic state none of this information was around during the recent Decade of the Brain.  The authors discuss the sensitivity of neurons to various toxic products and proteins and the implications for neurodegenerative diseases.  I can start with insomnia and build from there.  People with addictions can have sustained insomnia and associated impairment in cognition the next day.  Delirium also affects the sleep-wake cycle and some experts have suggested that two different types of delirium can be distinguished based on EEG spectra.  The obvious questions are is the insomnia associated with these states literally toxic to the patient by restricting ISF clearance?    Another key correlate mentioned by the authors is the decrease in ISF with age.  Does that account for the predisposition to delirium and protracted delirium as people age?  And finally what about the toxicity of medication?  We are used to receptor based explanations of why certain medications have sustained or unexpected toxicity.  How much of that is due to a collapsed ISF and restricted clearance to the CSF?

Brain energetics is also an interesting question specifically the AQP-4 channels.  Most psychiatrists are familiar with the renal aquaporin channels when considering renal water metabolism.  The fact that you have these channels on astrocytes and that removing them reduces (Aβ)  clearance by 65% is fascinating and seems like another potential intervention point for brain disease.  What needs to happen to keep these AQP-4 channels healthy and what happens when they are not? 

There are many more questions that come to mind based on the mechanism these authors have elucidated.  I hope that papers like these are translated into both clinical research and our thinking about newer and more innovative ways to think about whole brain function and think about all of the mechanisms instead of just the usual receptors.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Xie L, Kang H, Xu Q, Chen MJ, Liao Y, Thiyagarajan M, O'Donnell J, Christensen DJ, Nicholson C, Iliff JJ, Takano T, Deane R, Nedergaard M. Sleep drives metabolite clearance from the adult brain. Science. 2013 Oct 18;342(6156):373-7. doi: 10.1126/science.1241224. PubMed PMID: 24136970

Footnote:  I decided to update (12/13/2013) this post by adding this interesting piece of news.  According to Altmetric, this paper received the 4th highest rating of online interest in scientific papers.  For the Top 100 papers click on the link.

Stigltiz Commentary and The Implications for the Politics of Psychiatry

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz came out with a recent commentary of the economic recovery and why things are not a rosy as they seem.  He points out that many of the structural problems with the economy including predatory lending and credit, abuses by the credit card industry and abuses by the credit reporting industry are still in place.  In addition there are inadequate capital reserves and no real limits on the kind of low risk speculation by certain parts of the financial services industry - the basic problem that started everything 5 years ago.  I have been posting in political forums for the past 15 years that the American economy at times seems to be based on a fantasy rather than the way a real economy should work.

We have taken an alleged retirement system (401K, 403B) and turned it into a windfall for the financial services industry.  Instead of an actual retirement system, we find that the average American is not able to put away nearly enough to retire and in the process ends up paying significant fees to financial services companies.  In return for these fees they receive the standard boilerplate about no guarantee against losses and frequently have very poor investment choices since they are determined by their employer.  At the same time, low risk retirement vehicles like money market funds are paying negligible amount of interest.  Rather than being a reliable retirement system this is essentially another tax on the American people to fund the financial services industry.  Retirees are left with the option of accumulating cash only or putting their retirement funds at significant risk all of the time in order to accumulate enough capital to retire.

We are in the process of starting a huge health care mandate know as the PPACA or more popularly as Obamacare.  It will create a large influx of capital into the healthcare system based on coverage mandates.  The American health care system is currently the most expensive system of health care in the world.  The standard model used by the federal and state government has been to use managed care companies as intermediaries to contain costs.  There should be no doubt that model is a near total failure.  Recent data for example suggest that a couple nearing retirement should have an additional quarter of a million dollars saved for health care expenses during retirement beyond the cost of Medicare.  The health care system in this country can be viewed as a second tax on the American people.

How do Americans end up with two additional taxes being levied on them in addition to the usual income, Medicare, Social Security, sales, and property taxes?  How does it happen when we have a supposed radical element of one of the major parties working on fiscal responsibility?  I think it comes down to one American institution and that is the US Senate.  The Senate is full of aging, wealthy politicians who have worked for years to develop a power base in Washington and keep it.  They are completely out of touch with what the American people need and pass laws that will largely benefit the businesses that they are heavily lobbied by.  In some cases, they wrote the laws to invent the industry.  The disconnect of this group from the public was evident during the recent stand off to shut down the government and nearly default on our creditors.  In other words they risked the world economy to make a point instead of fairly representing what the average American wanted at that time.

How does all of this apply to the politics of psychiatry?  I can illustrate by looking at a few seminal events that apply to all front line psychiatrists and how their professional organization - the American Psychiatric Association (APA) responded:

1.  Managed care and the disproportionate rationing of psychiatric services:  Apart from Harold Eist, MD and a recent lawsuit against a managed care company there has generally been silence on this issue.  Some literature was generated regarding how to work with meager rationed resources but nothing about how to fight back as managed care became a government institution.  The APA's support of collaborative care means we have come full circle and the APA is explicitly backing a managed care model that involves treating patients without actually seeing them.

2.  The response to accusations of conflicts of interest related to the pharmaceutical industry:  There was a well known initiative against some prominent psychiatrists, the motivations for that initiative are still unknown.  It is well known that many academics in many university departments have contracting arrangements with industries in order to supplement their salaries.  It is well know that some professions charged with determining industry standards insist on industry representation in meetings where those standards are written.  It is known that many professional organizations got more support from the pharmaceutical industry than the APA.  The response to the attack from a Senator was to basically acknowledge that his attack was accurate and proceed with an appeasement approach that allowed critics of psychiatry to use this as additional rhetoric against the profession and any psychiatrist with a contracting arrangement.

3.  The Maintenance of Certification (MOC) issue:  This issue was forced by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) based on limited research.  The APA immediately aligned themselves with the ABMS despite considerable complaints and a petition by the membership.

The three examples given about are some of the main political issues for psychiatry, particularly the average working psychiatrist and the APA.  To say that the interests of most psychiatrists are not represented by the APA is a massive understatement.   Like the U.S. Senate, the APA seems almost totally disconnected from the people it is there to represent.  I have heard many reasons over the years about how the actual structure of the APA is the problem.  But nobody seems to want to remedy that problem.  I attended a seminar at one point where an APA official explained the MOC issue and how it would actually create a financial burden for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABNP), despite the obvious fee generation to take a commercially monitored and administered test.  If it really is that burdensome -  why do it in the first place?  The initial rationale was that the public demanded it.  It seems that there is now solicitation for public support.  Who would not support an initiative to improve the competency of doctors - even if there is absolutely no evidence that a multiple choice exam with a high pass rate does that?

I think it is highly likely that the political structure of the APA is very similar to the political structure of the Senate.  While there is no lobbying there are ideas and affiliations based on those ideas.  Any political structure that is so far removed from what its constituents want it driven by cluelessness, conflicts of interest, or a divine mandate.  It is only logical to conclude that like the Senate, the issue is conflicts of interest.  In the 21st century, patriotism is no longer the last refuge of a scoundrel - accountability is.  The APA would do well not to follow the Senate on that course.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Joseph Stiglitz.  5 Years In Limbo.  Project Syndicate, October 27, 2013.

Cravings

"Unlike most of our crowd, I did not get over my craving for liquor much during the first two and one-half years of abstinence.  It was almost always with me......"  Doctor Bob's Nightmare.  Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition, New York City, 2001, p 181.

Craving to use drugs and alcohol is a common problem.  As Doctor Bob points out in the above quote, craving is rare for alcoholics beyond the acute detoxification phase, but protracted for many other drugs depending on the class of addictive compound and the pharmacological properties of the specific drug.   Apart from the biological determined heterogeneity of response to addictive compounds there are also the subjective aspects.  In order strive for more objectivity, modern psychiatry has established diagnostic criteria for disorders of interest.  These disorders are grouped in categories to seem uniform.  Depending on the criteria of interest there is a broad range of subjective experience and description when describing common problem like anxiety and depression.  Some people don't know the difference between them.  Others have a mixture of both.  Some people are anxious all of the time independent of their surroundings.  Others get depressed or panic only in certain situations.  The interpretation of what a person considers to be a craving is as diverse.

Craving for an addictive drug or alcohol comes in many forms.  It can be a perception of a physical property of the actual compound itself such as the taste, odor, appearance or consistency.  It can be physical acts associated with its use and a common example there is a feeling that cigarette smokers get when they feel like they need to do something with their hands after they stop smoking.  It can be cue induced like being offered a drug or being in a place where previous drug transactions occurred.  It can be recall of the first intense and protracted euphoric experience of using the drug even though that has long passed related to tolerance.  The overwhelming affect associated with craving is anxiety and fear because of the sign on an impending withdrawal or relapse.  The negative reinforcement that keeps addictions going after the initial states of positive reinforcement due to the euphorigenic effects of the drug is avoiding withdrawal.  Craving may be a signal that acute withdrawal is imminent or that there is a state of chronic withdrawal.

Craving has had an uncertain place in the field of addiction and the diagnosis of addictive states, largely because of the broad range of experiences associated with craving.  This diagrammatic summary shows that various groups have considered the definition to be too vague.  In other cases there was no consensus that craving was a universal enough phenomenon to be considered a diagnostic criterion.  That changed this spring when the DSM-5 added craving and eliminated legal consequences of drug and alcohol use as a diagnostic criterion.  Medications used to eliminate cravings probably led to that consideration, but people with cravings are more likely to relapse and have significant distress during recovery.

The addition of cravings to the DSM-5 opens up a whole new area of focus during encounters with people who have addictions.  Prior to this change the two major texts on addiction devoted about 3-4 pages to craving phenomena.  Addiction psychiatrists and addictionologists may have already been focused on this area, but I think that overall it makes ongoing assessments more dynamic because it is an intervention point for physicians and there are a number of medical and non-medical interventions that are possible.  Omar Manejwala, MD reviews the options in his very readable book entitled Craving.  This book is interesting because it gives a number of practical tips on how to counter cravings based on the substance involved as well as the importance of psychosocial interventions like 12-step recovery and how that might work.  Addiction science has probably been at the cutting edge of neurobiology for at least the past decade and with this focus there is often the implicit understanding that we are searching for some medication that will be an immediate solution to craving.  In some cases we have that medication, but I always emphasize that cravings at some point disappear and that there are non medication approaches to addressing them.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Manejwala O.  Craving: Why We Can't Seem To Get Enough.  Hazelden, Center City, MN, 2013.

Definitions:

Neuropsychopharmacology The Fifth Generation of Progress (2002):  Craving is a powerful, "must-have" pull that causes addicted people to risk and sometimes lose, their relationships, families, money, possessions, jobs and even their lives. (p.1575)

No - I Don't Have Generalized Anxiety Disorder

I was reading a copy of JAMA the other day and a story written by a transplant surgeon Jeremy M. Blumberg, MD.  It was an excellent description of surgical training to the point of autonomy and then the nagging uncertainty of whether the surgery you have trained for years to do will go well.  Will you avoid mistakes?  He describes his first transplant as an attending:

"This operating room was new to me; the nurses were friendly but foreign.  The instruments were familiar, but somehow felt different - was there just a barely palpable increase in tension in the muscles of my hand causing this effect?  The patient's blood vessels were hard, thickened from years of dialysis and diabetes.  She bled more than usual when we reperfused the kidney.  It felt as if every last molecule of epinephrine had rushed out of my glands and nerves, squeezing my blood vessels and taunting my intestines to detonate...."  (p. 1676)

I hear you brother.  I thought that level of anxiety over the balance between doing the impossible and not doing harm might fade away over the years but it has not.  In psychiatry a lot of it depends on the level of complexity that your patients have.  It can be an acute situation but more often than not - it is a problem throughout the day that you take home with you.  Additional medical conditions, non psychiatric medications, polypharmacy, and difficult to treat disorders all compound the problem.  I have designed a hierarchy to illustrate what I mean.  It turns out that when I think about it, the acute problems seen by psychiatrists are not at the top.  The problems at the top are typically problems where there is no good guidance, where you are on your own, left with biologically determined probabilities and you need to come up with your best estimate of what will happen given current circumstances.  The problems encompass both psychiatry and the medicine associated with psychiatry.

Let me provide an example of both.  In the case of the psychiatric problem the usual scenario is a case of impaired judgment.  Is the person at risk for death or self injury?  Are they able to cooperate with the assessment and treatment plan.  Do they seem changed to the point that you can no longer accept their responses as being accurate?  Are you treating them for acute and chronic suicidal ideation and behavior?  Any acute care psychiatrist ends up assessing thousands of the situations across the course of their career.  It is often much more complex than an acute assessment.  Many of these scenarios unfold in the context of ongoing psychotherapy and in order for the patient to be able to improve some risk is taken.  In other cases there are calls to warn people and in extreme cases - calls to the police to check on a person who might be in trouble.  I have not seen it studied but the stress of these situations for the psychiatrist involved is well known.   Overthinking the situation in order to avoid the unexpected call that one of your patients has suicided or killed someone is common.  In my conversations with medical students over the years, one of the main deterrents to psychiatric residency is the worry about suicide prediction.

The medical situations are as complex and they frequently have no clear solution.  A common scenario is that the person has a severe mental illness and they develop a problem that leads to to rethinking the medication they are taking.  A common scenario is a person on maintenance therapy who suddenly develops a renal or hepatic problem necessitating a change in therapy.  The best example is bipolar disorder and lithium therapy.  Lithium remains the drug of choice for many people with bipolar disorder and it can be highly effective.  When I first started to practice it was common to see people who had repeated institutionalizations for bipolar disorder suddenly stabilized on lithium.  Their functional capacity was restored and they were able to return to work and establish families.  In those early days, the issue of lithium nephrotoxicity was not clearly observed.  There was a major study of people on lithium maintenance for decades that showed no difference in renal function.  In the last 15-20 years most nephrologists agree that lithium can lead to renal insufficiency and failure in a minority of patients on lithium therapy.  In the case of a person that lithium has been working well for 30 years, there is no guarantee that anything else will work as good.  That translates to no hospitalizations in a long time to frequent hospitalizations every year.  Monitoring that therapy and in some cases following the patient while they are in dialysis or after transplantation is on example of a situation that you can't leave at the office.

In many ways, the stress and anxiety in psychiatric practice is a measure of attempting to predict the unpredictable.  Psychiatry has accurately said that psychiatrists can't predict future behavior or rare events to explain why all suicides and homicides cannot be prevented.  But some sort of probability statement is inherent in all medical practice.  I would estimate it still happens to me about every three weeks.  Something isn't right and I don't have an exact answer.  It becomes an obsession to an extent.  Laying awake in bed.  Getting up to do some additional research but realizing ahead of time that the yield is low.  Realizing that no matter what decision you make - all of the outcomes are probably going to be suboptimal.  You always get to the point where you  can feel the adrenaline molecules rushing and your heart pounding.  You know you are tense and starting to break into a light sweat.  You readjust yourself in bed and realize your back and shoulders are as tight as a frozen hydraulic jack.  You might actually check your pulse and blood pressure and find that  they are elevated.  It goes on like this until something happens and the intellectual crisis abates.  Sometimes that takes a while - at one point months and a beta blocker to break up the stress induced tachycardia and hypertension.

No I don't have generalized anxiety disorder - I am a doctor trying to deal with the uncertainties of being human.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA