Saturday, January 7, 2023

Another Note on Gun Extremism - An Appeal to Grandparents

 


I cannot let this latest incident slide by. A colleague posted this article yesterday about a 6-year-old boy who shot a teacher during an altercation inside of a Virginia school. At the time I am typing this the teacher was listed in critical condition. The way this incident is reported is bizarre for a guy whose K-12 years were 1956 to 1969. It has nothing to do with banning guns – but it has everything to do with gun extremism to the point that people get casual about guns. They either forget that children and young adults do not have the necessary judgment to responsibly handle guns or the adults themselves do not exercise adequate judgment and either allow their children to have access to guns or do not secure them at home. Using firearms to settle trivial or inappropriate disputes is a clear example of a lapse in judgement.

Let me paint the picture about what it was like in the 1950s and 1960s before we were deluged with gun demagogues. Many families in the remote area where I was raised hunted for food or sport. The hunting included deer, rabbits, ducks, geese, pheasants, and partridge.  I don’t have any statistics but if I had to speculate – the hunting families were in the minority.  Most families that did not hunt and had no firearms on the premises. The only exception might be World War II veterans with souvenir weapons – mostly not maintained and unloaded.  If you had friends from hunting families and there was a chance that you might go hunting or target shooting with them – you had to take an NRA (National Rifle Association) Hunter’s Safety course. Most people took that course when they were in middle school.  It was taught by a middle-aged guy I knew from church.  He presented the course in a very calm matter-of-fact manner and clearly outlined all of the dangers of firearms.  I recall anecdotes about people being accidentally shot at home and injuries from the wrong ammunition being used in the wrong gun.  Rule number 1 was "never point a gun at anybody - even if you think it is not loaded."  We all fired air rifles and .22 caliber rifles at indoor ranges in his basement and at a larger range in the basement of a retail store downtown.  All guns had to be pointed downrange at all times away from the shooters.  Nobody fired a handgun, because you had to be 21 years of age to do that and we were all 12 or 13.

There were no political or marketing movements focused on firearms at the time.  We had to be NRA members to take the course. As long as you were an NRA member you got a monthly copy of their publication the American Rifleman.  The centerfold for that magazine was a long list of “sporterized” military rifles that could be purchased at a low price. I recall many days pouring over that list and thinking about what kind of rifle I would buy when I was old enough.  I never did buy that rifle.

The other incentives to stay engaged with the gun community was getting ratings based on your marksmanship. If you could demonstrate certain scores on targets you would qualify for small military style medals saying that you were an Expert or Distinguished Marksman. Like most skills, it took a little practice (but not that much) to become proficient in shooting. Contrary to some stories that you read today about hunters and school – nobody ever brought a gun to school. There were no Second Amendment discussions and no suggestion that the training had to do with militias. The result was that there was a small group of middle school kids who had taken a safety course focused on handling firearms while hunting.

That did not mean there were no firearm related deaths in my small community. During those early school years there were 2 suicides and a hunting accident, all involving kids who I knew.  Firearms are never completely safe even with limited access and training.

Back to the article – let me examine two direct quotes starting with:

“Experts said a school shooting involving a 6-year-old is extremely rare, although not unheard of, while Virginia law limits the ways in which a child that age can be punished for such a crime.”

Extremely rare but not unheard of is quite an introduction.  Within the space of 2 generations, we have gone from unheard of to rare but not unheard of. Without being an expert on Virginia law my speculation is that any legal decision about culpability and punishment is based on the capacity of a child to formulate a plan and rationally decide to shoot someone.  The irony here is that you can watch true crime television and see the same problem in all of the 20+ year old men who impulsively commit gun homicide. There are no reasons for these homicides.  They all seem to occur during trivial arguments where somebody gets angry and starts shooting.  The problem, is depending on the judgement of children and immature adults and the solution is not providing them access to firearms.

“Today our students got a lesson in gun violence,” said George Parker III, Newport News schools superintendent, “and what guns can do to disrupt, not only an educational environment, but also a family, a community.”

Unfortunately – the students did not need this “lesson”. From the description they were all traumatized and school shootings are so common in the US, that they are continuously exposed to it. I would not be shocked to learn that many of the students and parents involved had been worrying about an event like this for a long time. The people who ignore this “lesson in gun violence” are all adults.  Many of them are in positions where they could make a difference but consistently fail to do so – or even make decisions that increase the likelihood of future incidents. In the case of politicians, you share responsibility by voting for gun extremists.

As a country are we so oblivious to gun extremism and gun violence that we continue to allow a political party and a politicized gun organization to compromise the safety of school children and teachers? My appeal today is to the grandparents out there – people of my generation. If you remember what the gun atmosphere was like when you were a kid – compare it to what is going on right now.  Were there kids in your first grade class getting into altercations with teachers?  Was there gunfire in primary school?  Do you recall routinely hearing about primary and high school students being shot and killed?  Were there military style high capacity firearms widely available?  Were there armed militias wearing body armor standing outside of your state capitol?  Did the musicians you listen to endorse a lifestyle that involved gun violence to settle minor disputes? Were there people suggesting that you needed to carry a gun around with you at all times for protection? Could you pick up a gun and carry it around with no training and/or no permit?  If you are a person of my generation - the answer to these questions is no.

That is the country we have become. And it is all due to one political party, their politicized allies in the community, and their judges in the Supreme Court drastically changing gun access and attitudes about firearms in the community.  Nobody is safe with these people in power. 

Be a single issue voter and vote the gun extremists out.

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA


Supplementary 1:  Update on the incident that initiated this post.  Reports in the press today (1/9/2023) say the teacher was intentionally shot with a 9 mm handgun that the 6 year old took from his mother. There are conflicting reports that the teacher was trying to disarm the student when the shooting occurred.  She was shot though the hand and into the chest. She assured the safety of the rest of the students before seeking help for herself. The status of the handgun while all of that happened is unclear. She was reported as being in stable condition in a hospital.  The school is closed to give "students and families time to heal."

Supplementary 2:

Based on an initial response to this post let me be clear about the way to reign in gun fanaticism in the US.  To my knowledge no responsible person has ever suggested "grabbing guns" or "coming for your guns".  There are too many firearms in the United States for that or for gun "buy backs" to ever be practical. The gun grab argument was basically invented to create gun extremism.  Nobody was worried about it in the 1970s.

We are stuck with widespread gun availability and we need to keep them out of the hands of people who are likely to do the most damage.  Unfortunately that means a majority of people who would not fail either background checks or red flag laws. They are also probably more susceptible to the impulsive use of firearms not just for gun homicides but also gun suicides.  A good starting point would be:

1.  Universal background check - no state to state loopholes or private sale loopholes.

2.  Red flag laws - already incorporated broadly in the FBI NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) database.  That would include people adjudicated by a court as being at high risk of harming themselves or others if they had firearms.  Red flag laws should depend only on a direct or indirect threat to harm with a firearm. Since there is a very serious bomb hoax statute - an actual threat to an individual or a facility should be taken at least as seriously.  The standard should ne a threat to use a firearm and not having to provide the likelihood or using the firearm or potential dangerousness of the person making the threat.

3.  People with substance abuse disorders or mental illnesses at high risk for violence to self or others.  That should include a permanent ban on firearm acquisition where determined by a court.

4.  People with a history of actual violence to self or others. 

5.  Additional factors per the NICS system.

6.  Serious discussion is needed about the permit less system that is now in place in many states. A practical law would be to prohibit assault weapon sales, high capacity magazine sales, and increase the age for handgun purchases to 25+.  But now that there has been a lifting of the moratorium on gun violence research the research on gun violence in this age group and what kind of firearm is being used will make these conclusions obvious.  

7.  Stop encouraging legal gun violence. Stand your ground laws, permit less carry, and widespread access make guns available for dispute resolutions that do not require lethal violence. 

8:  Waiting periods for gun purchases. I have had too many people tell me that a waiting period saved them when they had transient thoughts of self harm.


Supplementary 3:  The easy access to firearms by everybody who want them is based on many false premises.  Here are a few:

1.  Do you really want everybody on the street to carry a firearm? Or do you only want a few special people to be carrying these firearms?   The assumptions here are obvious.  Only the good guys or maybe the masculine guys should be carrying guns. How do we determine who those people are?  Is it sex or gender based?  Or maybe it should depend on race?  Is there a box you can tick to just get a gun. Maybe this is why the gun extremists eliminated all of the boxes.  Thinking through that problem is just too hard.

2.  Maybe the gun extremists really mean that everyone should carry a gun. In that scenario it is fairly predictable that more and more minor disputes and arguments will be settled by gun violence. We have seen that happen in many national cases already and it obviously happens on true crime TV.  Even the Sheriffs in western towns in the 19th century saw this as a problem and had people coming into towns check their guns. (see Tombstone statute from 1851)

3.  There is an assumption that gun owners, especially concealed carry owners are supermen (or superwomen) who never make a fatal mistake with a gun, never get in an argument where they might threaten somebody with a gun, know where their gun is at all times, and never accidentally shoot themselves. We know from the data that none of that is true and we can see recordings of real time incidents on television that illustrate this fact including the news report that lead to this post.



References:

1:  Finley B, Barakat M. Police: 6-year-old shoots teacher in Virginia classroom.  Associated Press.  Fri, January 6, 2023 at 2:20 PM CST  Link

2:  American Progress.  Fact Sheet: Weakening Requirements to Carry a Concealed Firearm Increases Violent Crime.  October 4, 2022. Link


Graphics Credit:

Photo of the Polychrome Mountains that I shot in Alaska.



Friday, January 6, 2023

The Curious Sober Movement


 

I saw an interesting story on the news yesterday and found it was linked to an even earlier report in the Tokyo Times. There is a cultural movement in Japan among the younger generation to abstain from alcoholic beverages or drink only on special occasions. I saw a young woman interviewed and she described her motivation as wanting to spend her money on other things.  The report also said that alcohol use in Japan was a ritual for bonding in the workplace.  They showed images of work parties with many people drinking as well as a man in a suit passed out on at the edge of a train platform.  Survey data was quoted as saying that 90% of Japanese drink alcohol rarely or not at all. The most sobering statistic was that tax revenue from decreased alcohol use was down 30%. That drop caused the government to ask for suggestions about how to get people drinking again. That approach did not get any positive reviews in the man-on-the street interviews including a bartender serving non-alcoholic drinks. 

This story was immediately interesting to me for several reasons. First, I have always been puzzled by the American approach to intoxicants. On a cultural basis, they are considered a rite of passage and the best evidence is the data on substance use in college aged students and how it generally decreases over time. Second, there is always a great deal of ambivalence advocating sobriety as a reasonable lifestyle, even though most Americans either don’t drink or drink very little.  The American population has a lower level of lifetime abstainers and (expectedly) a higher number of former drinkers per the world average.  There is ample rhetoric in popular media and culture to ridicule people who don’t drink and in many cases drug users are idealized.  Third, the attitude extends to other drugs. Contrary to pro-cannabis hype, there are very few countries in the world where cannabis is legal much less sold in highly concentrated forms.  That same hype promoted the medical use of cannabis even though there is little evidence that it does much.  Similar arguments are being made about hallucinogens and in some cases, all scheduled drugs that are currently considered illegal. Fourth, intoxicants are generally heavily marketed to the public.  Vodka is a clear example.  The New York Times did a famous taste test of vodka comparing various vodkas to the least expensive brand (3). The least expensive brand won the competition.  At the time, many much more expensive designer vodkas had emerged from several countries.  One of the authors main points is that vodka is sold based on marketing rather than taste.  Many essays about vodka describe is as tasteless. Since 2005 there have been endless taste tests, rankings, and other promotions - basically more marketing.  More recently several prominent celebrities have promoted their own expensive brands of vodka and tequila. In some cases, the businesses have grown to very large values.  All of that based on marketing what is essentially a tasteless, intoxicant that comes with a long list of problems to people who want to drink it for how they see it advertised.  Fifth, the issues of tax revenue. Let’s face it – the only good reason to promote intoxicants is to make money. 

Most common intoxicants also reinforce their own use – at least for a significant segment of the population. That leaves politicians needing to counter that common knowledge. There are two arguments commonly used to do that.  The first is that we will tax the new intoxicant and that will create all kinds of revenues for services that taxpayers want. Alcohol, tobacco, and gambling taxes have been around for a long time and generate billions of dollars per year at the federal level.   Since, everyone knows that drugs and alcohol carry a heavy burden in terms of mortality and morbidity the second argument goes something like this: “We will create a special fund to help all of the people adversely affects by these intoxicants (and gambling).”  During my career as an addiction psychiatrist, I saw treatment services basically disappear.  They were few functional detox units, few functional substance use treatment units, and few addiction specialists.  There was a small remote gambling addiction residential treatment program – but it did not match the degree of gambling problem in the state.  If adequate finding for substance use treatment from sin taxes exists – please let me know about it because I have not seen it.  Like many products and services in the US, alcohol, intoxicants, and gambling all end up being promoted by governments at all levels as a revenue generating activity.  The damage done is rarely discussed.  

In the case of alcohol, the damage is unmistakable if you know friends or family members with the problem. Damaged relationships and marriages, legal problems and incarceration, and a list of significant medical complications.  The current government warning (7) on alcohol is:

GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects.

(2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems.

 May cause health problems is an understatement. A more appropriate statement would say can cause health problems up to and including birth defects and intellectual disability, mental illness, severe cognitive problems, liver disease, pancreatic disease, cancer, hypertension, and death. Rather than being explicit about the health risks for many years alcoholic drinks were promoted as heart healthy and increasing HDL or "good" cholesterol. Any slight advantage disappears when subjects recovering from alcohol use disorders are eliminated from the control group.

What about consumption figures?  The usual way that consumption is compared is by taking the alcohol content of all of the beverages consumed in a country and converting it to the equivalent amount of 80 proof ethanol. The per capita annual consumption can be compared in total volumes or standard drinks. A standard drink is 1.5 fluid ounces of 80 proof (40%) alcohol or the equivalent in any one of those drinks is considered a standard drink.   In the US 14 grams or 0.6 ounces of pure alcohol is considered a standard drink. Apart from consumption there are estimates of what the standard drink threshold might be to cause cirrhosis or pancreatitis. 

Comparing levels of alcohol consumption between the US, Japan, and Russia those numbers are 10.5, 10.09, and 9.97 liters per year. These are population averages and there is typically great variability between various populations and historically – even within the same population over time.  There is also a graphic that I made a few years ago (see header of this post) that takes a look at comparisons across several types of drinking relative to the average consumption of the world.

What is curious sober movement?  There seems to be very little written about it and essentially nothing in the scientific literature. That may be why the headlines all involve decreased tax revenues from decreased drinking.  Historically there have been sobriety movements in the past. The most well known one in the United States was the Temperance Movement.  It seems that a basic mistake of these movements is proselytizing and trying to influence politicians. The resulting Prohibition Era in the US is widely cited by drug legalization advocates as a failure, even though it was a law that could never be enforced and there were clear cut benefits for those who had no choice but to abstain.  The current pandemic highlights how limits on established behaviors including measures designed to limit infection and loss of life are immediately politicized and the resulting chaos results in a loss of any benefit. Some people would rather threaten public health officials rather than simply wear a mask. In the area of intoxicants, I am sure any measure to prohibit the sale of alcohol would result in similar reactions today. The legalization of cannabis has been sold to the public and politicians and once that is out of the gate – there is no turning back even though there is early evidence that it will be another blight on the land.

Whatever curious sober is – I hope it has traction in the United States. The travelling medicine show here never seems to stop. We have a massive drug and alcohol problem here and everybody should know it and more importantly act like it. The single best way to stop it – is not by providing treatment for addiction. The single best way to stop it is to not pick up a drink or a cigarette or any other intoxicant in the first place. In the public health field that is called primary prevention.  All of the intoxicant promoters joke about the "Just say no to drugs" public service messages.  Of course they would. Nobody ever talks about the fact that the best life you can live is a sober life. 

The young people in Japan are discovering that.

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA


Supplementary 1:  Vodka Pricing, Cost, and Profit 

I decided to make a graphic to show the raw material cost and various taxes on a 750 ml bottle of 80 proof vodka to illustrate how much profit can be made from marketing intoxicants in various ways. The raw material cost in this case is very low since beverage alcohol is distilled and sold by agribusinesses in large volumes.  There is apparently only one manufacturer in the US that does their own distilling. For most the manufacturing process consists primarily of filtering and adding various flavors.  The tax references are at the bottom of the page using Minnesota Department of Revenue guidelines.  There is conflicting information on sales tax but the Dept of Revenue said that it is charged so I included it in the graphic.  In Minnesota there is also an excise tax and a separate 2.5% tax on gross liquor sales.  Minnesota has taxes like the the MinnesotaCare Provider Tax on health care services that is currently at 1.6%.  In theory it can be passed through to the customer/patient but it is selective since reimbursement rates are set without it.  I would see this 2.5% tax as being similar and it would be included in the pricing. (click to enlarge graphic)

 




For tax comparisons, here is a table from reference 3 about the tax revenues generated from the last year available.


Note the differences in excise tax collected on each group of beverages based on the fact that alcohol content is the basis of taxes and also that the 2.5% tax on gross sales generates substantial revenue.

The most recent budget for the state of Minnesota was $53.7B compared with alcohol excise taxes of $187M or about 0.35%.   For comparison Japan generated $8.1 in alcohol tax in 2021 – 1.7% of overall tax revenue.



References:

1:  Why Japanese government is encouraging drinking.  CBS Morning News. December 31, 2022  https://www.cbsnews.com/video/why-japanese-government-is-encouraging-drinking/

2:  A 'sober-curious' generation leaves Japan with a hangover.  Should an arm of the government be encouraging people to drink, even in moderation?  Japan Times. August 24, 2022  https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2022/08/24/commentary/world-commentary/liquor-taxes/

3:  Asimov A.  A Humble Old Label Ices Its Rivals.  New York Times.  January 26, 2005.

4:  Lachenmeier DW, Kanteres F, Rehm J. Is it possible to distinguish vodka by taste? Comment on structurability: a collective measure of the structural differences in vodkas. Journal of agricultural and food chemistry. 2011 Jan 12;59(1):464-5.

5:  Hu N, Wu D, Cross K, Burikov S, Dolenko T, Patsaeva S, Schaefer DW. Structurability: A collective measure of the structural differences in vodkas. Journal of agricultural and food chemistry. 2010 Jun 23;58(12):7394-401.

6:  World Health Organization (WHO).  The Global Health Observatory. Global Information System on Alcohol and Health.  Levels of Consumption. https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/topic-details/GHO/levels-of-consumption  Accessed on 01/04/2023

7:  PART 16 - ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE HEALTH WARNING STATEMENT.  § 16.21 Mandatory label information.  Link

8:   AMERICA'S INSATIABLE DEMAND FOR DRUGS.  COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS.  UNITED STATES SENATE.  ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS.  April 13, 2016  Link

Saturday, December 31, 2022

The Rights Versus Treatment Debate

 


Just yesterday I coauthored a brief opinion piece on the issue of civil commitment and the issue of rights versus treatment (2). My co-author Mark L. Ruffalo had the great idea to initiate our commentary based on a letter from the late Darold A. Treffert, MD who was then the Superintendent of Winnebago State Hospital in Wisconsin. Dr. Treffert was also an expert on autism and savant syndrome.  I heard him speak on that topic about 15 years ago at the Door County Summer Institute.  His letter (2) was both a statement about the need for legal intervention and a call to action. In the final line, he attempted to solicit negative experiences from other physicians about a civil commitment process that erred on the side of rights rather than recognition of severe problems and treatment and the resulting problems.

Historically this letter came around the time that antipsychiatry forces were building and one of their main talking points was that there was no such thing as a mental illness.  People simply had “problems in living” and therefore no medical or legal intervention was necessary.  Certainly not a legal intervention that resulted in the deprivation of civil liberty.  The antipsychiatrists and liberty advocates failed to recognize the problem of severe mental illness and the associated lack of problem recognition and impaired decision making.  Those impairments greatly compromise any person’s ability to negotiate the world safely and take care of their self. The usual examples include suicidal or aggressive thoughts and behavior.  They can also extend to routine medical care and activities of daily living.  As an example – a person with severe mental illness may no longer see the need to take insulin for diabetes, or blood pressure medications, or anticonvulsants. That can precipitate a medical emergency in addition to any existing psychiatric emergency.

In Dr. Treffert’s letter, he mentions that the Wisconsin Supreme Court set a new commitment standard of “extreme likelihood that if the person is not confined he will do immediate harm to himself or others.”  Imminent likelihood became an impossible standard in many cases. Even if a patient had attempted suicide or assaulted someone, at any point during a one or two week court process – they could make the argument that the imminent danger had resolved – even if they were refusing treatment and continued to have severely impaired judgment. In that case what frequently happened was that courts experimented with rapid dismissals of commitment petitions – until there is a catastrophic outcome.  At that point they become as cautious as the physicians involved in assessing and treating the patient.

The dangerousness standard for commitment has additional unintended consequences. It functions as a de facto hospitalization standard. It is common that managed care companies deny payment for admissions or even continued stays in the hospital based on the imminent danger statute even in patients being treated on a voluntary basis. The applicable standard in this case should be an adequate treatment standard – also a quality standard.  It is highly likely that any patient admitted after a suicide attempt or episode of severe aggression will continue to have that problem if they are discharged without adequate treatment. Adequate psychiatric treatment generally takes much longer than typical 2-to-3-day crisis hospitalizations. As a de facto standard in the managed care era, it is also easy to discharge a patient who is uncooperative with care by documenting the resolution of the imminent crisis and discharging them rather than working on relationship building and a plan based on a therapeutic alliance. The adversarial legal standard becomes an adversarial medical process. 

Imminent danger standards also fail to recognize forensic populations, the subgroup of people with severe mental illness who have a pattern of violent crimes and have a chronic risk of violent and aggressive behavior. This group of patients often cannot be treated in the same setting as other patients with severe mental illness, and require treatment in forensic settings with adequate staffing and protections for both patients and staff. That segregation can also occur at the community hospital level, where just a few hospitals have psychiatric units and fewer have units that are designed to contain aggressive behavior. Aggression and violence in psychiatric settings is so stigmatized that its existence is commonly denied unless someone is trying to make a political argument that involves blaming societal violence on psychiatric patients.  Even then there are counterarguments that it does not exist. I have been advocating the position that violence and aggression secondary to mental illness are public health problems that should be addressed at that level for at least 20 years.  During that time, I have not seen a single public service announcement with that message.  Instead, the political and legal system continues to ignore that approach by flooding the country with firearms, closing many if not most community mental health centers, closing supported housing, and failing to provide affordable housing.

The response from journalists is not much better – ranging from overt misinformation about psychiatry and mental illness to the occasional human-interest story. The people who know the most about the problem – psychiatrists, social workers, and case managers are left out of the loop in favor of the most convenient critic. Journalists seem unaware of conflict of interest of many of their recruited experts and do not apply the same standard that they would for a psychiatrist.  Journalists and politicians also promote widespread cannabis use and in some cases legalization of many drugs that all pose serious health risks to psychiatric populations.  It is as if saying that out loud is bad for business and tax revenues.  

The humane aspects of involuntary treatment are often turned on their head in the rights versus treatment debate.  Is it more humane to keep persons with mental illness circulating between short term hospital with minimal to no treatment, jails, and homelessness because they do not recognize the problems they are having and fail to come up with solutions, or is it more humane to offer involuntary treatment?  Context is very important.  In my experience, during involuntary treatment – therapeutic alliances occur as it becomes evident that the treatment providers are helping the patient survive better. People with impaired insight and judgment require evidence that they are being helped and that is generally a turning point in the process. If a person is homeless, the evidence has to be provided right where they are – on the street.  That requires active outreach by treatment teams. Ideally that can happen before any crisis occurs that may lead to civil commitment and involuntary treatment. But even if the patient is committed active intervention to support them outside of institutional settings is possible.  This method of community psychiatry and community support has been around since it was invented by Len Stein, MD and Mary Ann Test, MSW in the 1970s. I was fortunate enough to have been supervised by Dr. Stein during residency and one of the key concepts was “the money has to follow the patient.”  In other words, the money used to finance extended state hospital stays had to be used to treat people in the community and provide them with their own housing.  This was a model to maintain people disabled by severe mental illnesses in their own housing.  The other elements included active outreach and 24/7 availability of staff to help them resolve any crises. That basic model has been around for 50 years and it is rarely implemented and only recently discussed in mainstream medical journals.

The primary reason we have a problem with both homelessness and untreated chronic mental illness in the United States is economic. The managed care model of health care administration showed how easy it was to deny and ration psychiatric care to make money.  That model was sold based on increased efficiency and cost containment – but at this point it is obvious that it does neither. It does reroute funds to pay for a massive increase in the number of administrators at both the private and public levels.  These administrators are largely focused on enforcing the rationing of care instead of providing quality care. In fact, the real onset of managed care heralded the total disappearance of quality metrics in medical care. Quality was no longer monitored by external agencies.  It was internalized in managed care organizations. The focus went from adequate treatment of a problem to how quickly a person could be discharged to maintain profitability under an unrealistic reimbursement system.  That approach is a disaster for acute care psychiatry, community psychiatry, and it makes involuntary treatment more likely from the resulting chronicity. It has also been a major frustration for outpatient psychiatrists trying to get hospital access for their patients in crisis. But the economics are generally swept under the rug or discussed at a superficial level by the critics.

At the community level, rather than active outreach by trained mental health staff most communities end up using law enforcement or other first responders with minimal to no mental health training. In most communities they are the only staff available on a 24/7 basis and that is also a funding issue. There are situations where the police do need to be involved in a mental health crisis, but that is far less common than the need for mental health intervention.

What are the solutions? I have written about many on this blog over the years. At the top of my lost today is just moving past the rights versus treatment debate. It has been a stalemate for 50 years while the entire system of care has collapsed due to rationing. The rights have been adequately safeguarded for decades and arguments about abuses before that time are irrelevant. What do I mean about adequate safeguards? In the state where I worked, there was a prepetition screener, a prepetition screening team (to discuss the merits of commitment and whether the patient met statutory requirements), 2 court appointed examiners, a defense attorney, a country attorney, a probate court judge, and if necessary, a substance use assessor.  That is about 7-10 people independent of the treating staff and any one of who could disagree with the commitment process.  I am not aware of any legal process that provides more safeguards.

On the treatment side, there is a legal concept called least restrictive treatment. That simply means a treatment setting where the person is free to come and go as they please rather than being in a facility where they either can’t leave or have to ask for permission.  The goal of the Stein and Test model was to maintain people in their own apartment – the least restrictive of all. That is a goal that any functional system should aspire to.  When we hear about the homeless problem only a fraction of those folks have severe mental illnesses.  Another fraction has substance abuse problems. The obvious solution is a housing first option that may include social support or in the case of mental illness case management services with active community psychiatry outreach.  The first step is not transport to emergency departments and admission to psychiatric units.   

Another unmentioned dimension on the treatment side is well trained and motivated staff.  Police officers do not choose a career in law enforcement because they are interested in communicating with and treating people with severe mental illnesses. Mental health staff do.  Communication and relationship building goes a long way toward defusing a crisis and preventing involuntary treatment.

Addressing the dilapidated psychiatric infrastructure is the final step. The issue of psychiatric beds is a chronic problem with the ongoing political rhetoric that no more are needed compared with needs analyses based on bringing the length of stay (LOS) of psychiatric patients in the emergency department to the same LOS as medical and surgical patients. On that basis – there are very few places in the US with adequate psychiatric beds.

By far – the single most detrimental factor has been the managed care model of rationing in health care systems and by the states. Denying care will always be more cost effective than providing care.  It is also a good model for generating profits. Much of that early profit was made by shifting the cost of effective care for serious mental illnesses away from subscriber-based health care systems to state funded systems – at least until the states adopted the model for themselves. Any serious discussion of the rights versus treatment debate needs to start at that point. Involuntary treatment and civil commitment will never be a solution to the problem of homelessness or the revolving door of people with severe mental illnesses getting inadequate treatment.

I wish that I could end the year on a more positive note but things seem very grim out there. We are still in the midst of a pandemic that has showcased how susceptible the public is to misinformation and political manipulation.  I can't help thinking that this has been the state of affairs in psychiatry for the past 50 years and this post is some of that evidence.  I am hoping that we can see the rise of some leaders in psychiatry to counter these trends - just as we have seen experts in virology and engineering counter the coronavirus misinformation.  But it seems like it will take a lot more than that.

Here is hoping for a better year in 2023 and beyond!

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

References:

1:  Ruffalo ML, Dawson G.  Still Dying With Their Rights On, 50 Years Later.  Psychology Today December 30, 2022 Link

2:  Treffert DA. "Dying with their rights on". Am J Psychiatry. 1973 Sep;130(9):1041. doi: 10.1176/ajp.130.9.1041. PMID: 4727765.


Photo Credit:

Eduardo Colon, MD with thanks.


Additional Posts Relevant To This Topic:

 1:  The Problem With Inpatient Units:  Link

 2:   Are There Any Good Jobs Left for Psychiatrists?  Link

 3:  The Bureaucratic Takeover of American Psychiatry: Link

 4:  There Is No Identity Crisis In Psychiatry  Link

 5:  Holding Tank or Psychiatric Unit?  Link

 6:  Medical Care of the Seriously Mentally Ill - The Way It Should Be Provided Link

 7:  Governments and Psychiatric Beds  Link

 8:  The New York Times Steers The Mental Health Conversation in the Wrong Direction  Link

 9:  Bedless Psychiatry and  Recipe for Remaining Bedless  Link

10:  The New York Times Article on Why Mental Health Can't Stop Mass Shooters  Link

11:  My Opinion on Community Mental Health from 1989  Link

12:  Minnesota's Abandonment of the Severely Mentally Ill - Nearly Complete  Link

13:  Treatment setting Mismatches - The Implications  Link

14:  Why There Are No Bipartisan Solutions to Exorbitant Health Care Costs in the USA  Link

15:  A Circular Ethical Argument About Psychiatric Services  Link

16:  The EMTALA Paradox  Link  June 11, 2017

17:  Managed for Mediocrity - Corporate Medicine in the 21st Century  Link

18:  Remission Before Discharge?  An Un-American Concept  Link

19:  Do Businessmen Dream of Medicine Without Doctors?  Link

20:  Americans Can't Do Basic Health Care Arithmetic  Link

21:  The Largest Psychiatric Hospitals in the USA Link

22:  Hospitalists...  Link

23:  A Better Analysis of the Psychiatrist "Shortage"  Link

24:  Just When You Thought American Healthcare Could Not Get Any Worse  Link

25:  Newsflash from the StarTribune - Psychiatric Patients Have Nowhere to Go  Link

26:  Medicine to Psychiatry to Parking Lot:  The Evolution of Detox Over the Past 30 years  Link

27:  Admission, Discharge, and Readmission Policies: No Better Example of Business Driven Pseudoscience  Link

28:  How To Ruin You Life Without Being Dangerous  Link

29:  How the Ruling Class Impacts Your Health Care and Why They Need to be Stopped  Link

30:  Trauma In Psychiatric Hospitalizations  Link



Wednesday, December 7, 2022

What drugs should psychiatrists prescribe?

 


That was a question posed by a recent paper in Academic Psychiatry (1).  The focus was on psychopharmacology agents from the perspective of older agents like lithium, monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), and tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs).  Every few years, the debate about these drugs is rekindled – almost like the stereotypical old man shouting: “Hey you kids – get off my lawn.”   Should psychiatrists know how to prescribe older agents – of course they should. First off, the age of the agent has nothing to do with efficacy. Lithium is the best example there and it continues to have the best efficacy for bipolar disorder relative to new agents.  TCAs and MAOIs have comparable efficacy to newer antidepressants like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) but given the span of clinical trials – a strict comparison is not possible. Some authors do make unequivocal statements about both TCAs and MAOIs having superior efficacy to SSRIs. But in my opinion meta-analyses does not eliminate the differences in clinical trials technology over the past 50 years.

The authors make some of these arguments and suggest a number of biases that may be operating against prescribing these medications. Some of those biases originate in risk perception. In general, newer medications do tend to be safer.  They are certainly not without risk.  Serotonin syndrome and neuroleptic malignant syndrome are the typical rare but high-risk complications of prescribing psychiatric medications but there are many more. The rational discussion of risk involves knowing the pharmacology, knowing any risk mitigation strategies, knowing to what extent your patient can co-manage that risk with you, and the explicit informed consent discussion outlining the risks.

In my experience about 15-20% of outpatients do not tolerate modern antidepressants well at all. I have always encouraged people in that situation to try something different. TCAs and MAOIs are certainly not devoid of side effects but it is possible to change to one of those medications and the patient notices immediately that the drug is well tolerated and eventually effective.  Clinical trial data will show that as a group SSRIs are safer and better tolerated than either TCAs or MAOIs but in the clinic we are treating individuals and not groups.  On an individual basis, people are selected based on whether they tolerate a class of medications or not and that does not mean that they will not tolerate all medications.  With lithium, MAOIs, and TCAs – the informed consent discussion needs to include the potential toxicities with reassurances that the goal is to avoid side effects and complications. 

That has been my approach to psychopharmacology for 35 years. It was easier for me to have this perspective because when I started out back in 1986, the only antidepressants available were TCAs and MAOIs. I also trained with two psychiatrists, James Jefferson and John Greist who wrote the Lithium Encyclopedia and ran the Lithium Information Center.  In the days prior to the internet, it was a repository of all known hard copy references to lithium in the medical literature. There were additional formative experiences, most notable 22 years on acute care units where you are the person responsible for the total medical and psychiatric care of the patient. It was common to see patients on multiple psychiatric and nonpsychiatric medications with varying levels of adherence and instability. In some cases, they were accompanied by several shopping bags of medications and it was impossible to determine what medication was being taken and what was not. In many cases the medical providers and the psychiatric providers had never communicated and there was redundancy and drug interactions. My job in that situation was to make the best estimate of what medications could be safely started and to follow the patient closely so that they could be adjusted. That requires a good knowledge of medications that are used to treat endocrine/metabolic conditions, infectious diseases, rheumatic disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, cardiac conditions, dermatology conditions, chronic pain and neurological conditions.

In other words, most medications that are commonly used. And why wouldn’t psychiatrists prescribe everything both inside and outside of the specialty?  I have been fortunate enough to work with many Internal Medicine specialists and subspecialists. I have witnessed what happens when they encounter a medication that they do not routinely prescribe. They ask the patient about why it was prescribed and their experience with it.  They read the package insert and decide whether to prescribe it or not.  The idea that each specialty has limited knowledge about prescribing medications outside of that specialty seems like an erroneous assumption to me.  It is even clearer now that we have nonphysician prescribers with less basic science and pharmacology knowledge and less supervised prescribing training not restricted to any set group of medications. Physicians have been trained in all classes of pharmacology and should have worked out a general approach on how to safely prescribe any medication encountered.  Physicians also need to know about the range of medications in the population they are working with.  Adapting to the medications utilized by different populations is all part of the practice of medicine.  Today and in the future it is conceivable that a typical psychiatrist may cycle through 4 or 5 different practice scenarios, each one requiring unique a unique knowledge of pharmacology.

That does not mean that I am going to start diagnosing and treating arrhythmias like a cardiologist.  But it does mean that if I get a patient admitted to my inpatient service who is taking an antiarrhythmic that I should be able to decide to continue or restart it, what monitoring needs to be done, whether an ECG needs to be ordered, whether to get a Cardiology consultation or contact the patient’s cardiologist (stat or electively), and whether any medication I want to start or change will affect either the antiarrhythmic or the patient’s underlying cardiac condition. The same process is true for every medication on their list.

The typical argument I encounter with that suggestion is: “Well most psychiatrists don’t practice in that kind of intense medical environment.”  My answer is – open your eyes. It is not enough to look at a typical list of medications in an electronic health record (EHR) and focus only on the ones that psychiatrists should prescribe.  It is not enough to assume that your patient’s list of medical problems is being adequately addressed.  Psychiatry from my perspective still means that the psychiatrist has some responsibility for the total medical care of the patient. In today’s fragmented medical care environment, the psychiatrist may be the only physician the patient is seeing. When asked who their doctor is – many people will name their psychiatrist.

That opinion is bound to make some psychiatrists nervous. They may have the thought; “How can I provide that level of care when I am being reimbursed less and have to spend most of my time doing clerical work for the EHR?” That is a fair question and one without an obvious answer. If administrators were really interested in quality care, they would give primary care physicians and psychiatrists enough time for that level of analysis. Psychiatrists need more time to establish and attend to their relationship with the patient.  But the medical stability of the patient and assuring that they are not experiencing adverse effects and that treatment is effective is an absolute priority. 

Psychiatrists need to be trained to make these assessments and they need to be able to prescribe and modify a significant pharmacopeia extending well beyond what exists in a psychopharmacology text. That skill is predicated on the extensive content in basic science and clinical literature on pharmacology and also the process of learning about new drugs and how to safely prescribe them. That learning process is largely implicit and not discussed enough.  If it was, it could be applied to older medications as well.    

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

Supplementary:

I need to add a comment to this post because a lot of practice settings are designed to support specific prescription practices.  For example, there are a lot of private practices that focus primarily on the treatment of anxiety and depression.  There is also the assumption that more complicated pharmacotherapy such as the prescription of lithium needs referral out to a psychopharmacologist. In other cases, clinics will specialize in prescribing that fits specific diagnoses rather than the universe of psychiatric disorders.  Those practices stand in contrast to patients who are unable to get adequate medical or psychiatric care and routinely have their prescriptions disrupted. 

When that does happen they can end up in between prescriptions, self rationing prescriptions, or just not taking any prescribed medication for a while. Depending on the underlying medications, that alone can precipitate a crisis that any psychiatrist or trainee should be able to recognize and address. 

The first place that kind of training occurs is during the admission and coverage of inpatient units. The first orientation to these units should be a discussion of the expectations for prescribing to inpatients in acute care settings. It is not a question of waiting for a physician to sort things out the next day or hoping that a medical consultant will see the patient and make the necessary changes.  Each physician and trainee in that setting needs to know how to make acute assessments, determine the need for medications, and either make those changes or figure out how to get help on an acute basis.  Recognizing the urgency of situations like prescribing insulin for diabetes mellitus is as important as knowing the pharmacology.  Nobody should leave trainees guessing on their first call night.


References:

1:  Balon R, Morreale MK, Aggarwal R, Coverdale J, Beresin EV, Louie AK, Guerrero APS, Brenner AM. Responding to the Shrinking Scope of Psychiatrists' Prescribing Practices. Acad Psychiatry. 2022 Dec;46(6):679-682. doi: 10.1007/s40596-022-01705-1. PMID: 36123516.


Photo Credit:

Eduardo Colon, MD. - many thanks.

 

 

Thursday, November 24, 2022

Electrophysiology 2nd opinion – implications for medical and psychiatric practice

 


Pandemic related inaccessibility prevented me from getting timely Cardiology appointments this year.  As a result, I ended up with my scheduled consultation and a second opinion consultation spaced just two weeks apart.  I talked with a 2nd electrophysiologist today. He had records about me dating back to 2009. I had consulted with a cardiologist who was an exercise physiologist and another electrophysiologist at that clinic. After reviewing the recent history of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation again we had a very interesting conversation.

He reviewed the issues of rate versus rhythm control again. The priority is reducing stroke risk and that is done by anticoagulation. When it comes down to trying to maintain a normal sinus rhythm and all the measures that involves the decision is based on "How much does the arrhythmia bother you". He gave many examples that I was familiar with including the person who is not aware of being in atrial fibrillation until you tell them. I have made the diagnosis many times by taking vital signs on people and noticing their irregularly irregular pulse and pulse deficit. Most of the time they have no awareness of the arrhythmia. In some cases, they have been advised of the arrhythmia but decided not to do anything about it. I am in the category of people with what I like to call "cardiac awareness". I know immediately if I am in atrial fibrillation or even having palpitations. I check my own vital signs 3 times a day-in triplicate. We had a discussion of my neurotic tendencies and how much this rhythm problem bothers me – even if I am in atrial fibrillation only a few times a year for a brief period.

This point is also critical when it comes to treating psychiatric conditions. A misrepresentation of medical and psychiatric treatment is that physicians are drumming up business and manipulating populations into unnecessary care. Either that - or the care is just automatic and dependent on a diagnosis or blood test.   One of the favorite fabrications is that the DSM is designed expand treatment and line the pockets of both psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies. In fact, I have not seen a patient in outpatient practice that was not there because they were distressed, bothered by their current symptoms, and unable to get help anywhere else. In my conversation today with the electrophysiologist we are contemplating a 3-hour procedure under general anesthesia with significant potential complications including bleeding, stroke, the need for pacemaker placement, and death - all based on my subjective assessment of how much this arrhythmia bothers me. Based on level of risk – there are no equivalent decisions in psychiatry.

To reinforce that point, he said that cardiologists have been trying to show that rhythm control is superior to rate control for about 40 years and the evidence was very thin and possible non-existent. Based on the discussion of stroke prevention, that assumes that anticoagulation reduces stroke risk on the atrial fibrillation group to the same level as the normal sinus rhythm or rhythm group. I would give the edge to the rhythm control group on that parameter.  In terms of lifestyle measures rhythm control would potentially eliminate other nuisance rhythms like bigeminy and trigeminy if the origin was in the pulmonary veins.  Additional mapping occurs during the procedure to see if there is another focus for these rhythms.  The atrial flutter would need to be eliminated in a procedure on the right side of the heart. A concern that we did not discuss is a sudden worsening of the atrial fibrillation or atrial flutter to the point that a different antiarrhythmic would need to be used.  I have seen amiodarone added at that point and there are many complications with that medication – including death from pulmonary complications.

We got into a discussion about phenotypes based on the recent New England Journal of Medicine review. The focal point was whether a paroxysmal atrial fibrillation pattern like mine was easier to covert by an ablation procedure and remain in a normal sinus rhythm and remain in that rhythm.  He was aware of the review, but thought that not enough is currently known about phenotypes.  That seem to be a problem with a lot or intermediate or endophenotypes that are used in psychiatry and other fields like asthma or multiple sclerosis.  On the surface there appear to be a lot of easily described apparent subgroups, but the natural history of those groups and the underlying pathophysiology is essentially unknown and considerable heterogeneity in severity, course, and outcomes remains.   

There was a brief discussion of the athlete’s heart.  He had no reason to doubt that the slightly enlarged left atrium and aortic root on my echocardiogram was due to decades of intense athletic activity and knew that was also one of many potential factors leading to atrial fibrillation.

The question of early rather than late ablation was discussed and the idea that there is progressive remodeling in the heart due to atrial fibrillation even in the case of a few episodes per year. He thought that in general, ablation prior to persistent atrial fibrillation resulted in better outcomes and earlier ablation was better than late ablation.  He emphasized that these were across group comparisons and there was a heterogeneity factor at work.  All the ablation that he does is radiofrequency ablation and the result is anywhere from 75-90% effective depending on how well the pulmonary vein isolation goes.  That is balances against a 2-3% risk of adverse effects – largely in the form of bleeding and hematoma formation at the catheter sites.  Chest pain and migraine headaches are also common post procedure.  Very serious complications during the procedure including death and the need for pacemaker placement were at about 1%.  The only death he had seen during the procedure was unrelated to the ablation.

He had a different opinion about the dose of flecainide and moving on to other antiarrhythmics like sotalol.  He thought I could take twice as much flecainide as a standard trial dose 150 mg BID), but agreed that it might not make much difference in the low frequency of atrial fibrillation.  That is quite a difference in flecainide dosing compared to the other group of cardiologists that I consult with.

In terms of recovery time give my current workout schedule he thought it would take a month to get back up to speed.  At that point I could resume my usual activities. If I decided to do that soon it would mean putting speedskating on hold for another winter.

That is where I am at after the second opinion.  Assuming that my insurance is the same across facilities – I have two to choose from and two electrophysiologists willing to try the ablation. My choice is to weigh a moderately successful procedure against the low frequency but significant complications and make the decision. And I know at this point it is an elective procedure based on how disruptive this arrhythmia is to my life. It is possible that at some point due to worsening atrial fibrillation and/or flutter and associated worsening symptoms or cardiac function that it would be less elective.

In terms of comparison with psychiatric practice and the usual critiques – these are the same choices that people would have if they were seeing me in clinic with a few exceptions. I am not treating anyone with invasive procedures or general anesthesia.  The medications prescribed by psychiatrists are generally safer that antiarrhythmics. There is a long list of absurd complaints made by antipsychiatrists that could similarly be applied to this cardiology scenario. But most importantly – in either case the treatment decision by the patient is subjectively based on how much the symptom is bothering them. I do not know how to translate 4 hours of symptoms per year into what I have been told about daily anxiety and depression symptoms every week. Some of those symptoms are also cardiac in origin.  

But I think this highlights a completely neglected dimension of medical and psychiatric practice.  Treatment is based on more than a rational informed consent discussion and weighing the risks and benefits. It is based on more than a scientific diagnosis and confirmatory tests.

It is highly subjective and based on the personal experience of the patient that is rarely know to casual observers.

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

 Supplementary:

I thought I would add some additional observations about my recent cardiology consults and how they compare with psychiatric practice. Putting these in the main body of the post would have increased the reading difficulty.

Categorial diagnosis versus something else:  It is fashionable these days to say that medically diagnosed syndromes are a thing of the past and we should be making dimensional diagnoses or systems diagnoses.  Of course, these have been tried in the past. Contrary to a standardized approach – the diagnostic and treatment approach is highly practice dependent as can be noted by comparing the recommendations of the last 2 posts.  In addition, there is a fine structure to categories that is so detailed that it cannot be listed as criteria. Diagnostic categories in medicine have been talked about as prototypes – but it is really an indexing system for each physician to catalogue everything they know about that disease especially in the populations they are treating.

There may be objections to this conceptualization of categorial diagnosis.  Shouldn’t all clinicians be making the same diagnosis based on some sort of standardization?  That is certainly the argument many people make – but it certainly is not realistic.  Experts have seen more cases, know more variations, and have seen more diagnostic errors in the conditions they are diagnosing and treating. They have studied those conditions more thoroughly than anyone else. To suggest that a non-expert can read criteria in a diagnostic manual or administer a checklist of symptoms from that manual and get the same results is a significant misunderstanding of the process.  

Any medical category can be parsed based on severity and using that metric will lead to different assessments and treatments within the same category That is as true for cardiac arrhythmias as well as categories of depression and psychosis. A related issue on the medical side is that all the associated symptoms that might be lumped into lifestyle effects or suggest a psychiatric disorder are basically ignored if they do not show up on a PHQ-3 that is given as part of a preregistration packet.

The good news here is that subjectivity is alive and well in medicine and psychiatry as it should be.  Our biology determines unique presentations of our illnesses as well as our reaction to them.  The physicians treating us have to understand that.