Prescribing Psychotherapy: Today's Grand Rounds at Johns Hopkins

Today, I heard Dr. Meg Chisholm give Grand Rounds at Johns Hopkins Hospital on "Prescribing Psychotherapy." Coming at it from an obviously pro-psychiatrist-as-psychotherapist bias, Dr. Chisholm discussed the financial forces that encourage psychiatrists to have "med check only" practices. She mentioned Daniel Carlat's book, Unhinged, and even showed a picture of it --she gave it a thumbs up. Meg quoted someone as saying that psychiatrists are a precious resource and should only be doing time-efficient psychopharmacology and presumably cranking through those patients as fast as possible. She showed bar graphs that illustrate how fewer shrinks are doing psychotherapy and fewer patients are getting it. In terms of cost, it's not clear that split therapy is cheaper, and psychiatrist-for-meds/psychologist-for-therapy is actually more expensive than one-stop shrinking. She made the excellent point that while we know that a combination of therapy and meds works best for some conditions, we don't know if people do better if they have therapy with a psychiatrist or split therapy with two mental health professionals, and we really need outcome studies. Finally, she talked about what role, if any, psychotherapy training should have in the education of psychiatrists during residency.

There was a portrait of one of our mentors, the late Dr. Jerome Frank, a pioneer in psychotherapy researcher at Hopkins. Meg showed a photo from his younger days, but I chose one of Dr. Frank as I remember him (see above). There was the requisite cartoon of a psychoanalyst, and a picture of the fictional Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) over his In Treatment couch. Ah, but Meg has it wrong--- she's never watched the show yet her research revealed that Paul is a psychiatrist who prescribes medicine, but Paul is a psychologist with training in psychoanalysis. No prescription pad and we never see him actually practice psychoanalysis.

A psychologist in the audience made the point that the experience of doing split therapy is very different when done with different psychiatrists, and that it's a totally different event with a primary care doctor.

My thoughts? I had a few.

-- I don't like the implication that psychiatrists "should" practice a certain uniform way. "Should" every psychiatrist have to do psychotherapy even if they hate listening to the same patients? "Should" every psychiatrist see four patients per hour even if they would much rather practice psychotherapy? Doctors should do what they do best and like best, and it's fine if some docs do psychotherapy and some docs don't. Would we dictate that doctors in shortage fields shouldn't be allowed to hold administrative positions, do research that could be done by Ph.D's, take maternity leave, pursue hobbies, or have blogs?

--There's more to psychotherapy than just psychotherapy. Seeing patients often and for in-depth sessions allows for a more careful use of medications. In clinic settings where patients are seen infrequently and everyone's expectations are for 20 minute visits every 90 days, it's very difficult to address the question of whether a stable patient might do better on a different medication regimen. The risk of stopping a medication is often riskier than just continuing with the status quo. The question "Are you the best you can be?" doesn't get addressed and major changes in medications usually happen during periods of crisis or hospitalization.

--Psychotherapy continues to be an integral part of psychiatric treatment and residents should be required to learn to do psychotherapy even if they never plan to do it again. Without seeing patients through the process, a psychiatrist can't really appreciate the benefits or limitations, and the while we might like to think that psychotherapy is something one "prescribes" just like bactrim or synthroid or insulin, we all know that some people feel more helped by therapy than others and the importance of the interpersonal rapport is not something one can generically dictate.
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Really good Grand Rounds.

Related Post: The Psychiatrist as Therapist

PT: Psychotherapy "Alive and Talking"

This month's Psychiatric Times continues the discussion [registration required :-( ] about the NY Times article on psychotherapy that Dinah and readers discussed on April 9. This time, our colleague, Ron Pies MD, authored this article which deconstructs the myths perpetrated in the NYT article, which interviewed a med check doctor who found it "sad" that his patients found him to be important to them in their lives (read the article for the full flavor).

I'm glad that Ron pointed out (as we have) that the 2008 Mojtabai and Olfson article -- which implied that only 11% of US outpatient psychiatrists provide psychotherapy -- was a misleading statistic. Why? Because they did not consider brief psychotherapy sessions (30 minutes or less) to be classified as "psychotherapy" for their session. Thus, a 90807 (45-50 min) is considered psychotherapy, but a 90805 (20-30 min) would not be considered so, even though the AMA's CPT manual defines it as psychotherapy. Also, brief and supportive forms of psychotherapy are often given even when only a "med check" is billed. Nonetheless, the sound bite from that article has been: "Only 11% of psychiatrists do psychotherapy". It just ain't true. As Mark Twain said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

Is it Ever Okay to Lie?

We've been having a great discussion over on the post Tell Me.... An Ethical Dilemma.  The post talks about a young man who wants to know if he can check "no" to a question about whether he has a psychiatric disorder if his illness is not relevant to the situation.  The comments have been fascinating -- do read them-- and very thought-provoking.


One reader asked, " If a patient asked if they were boring you, and they were, would you say yes?"

This is a great question, and of course the right thing to do is to explore with the patient what meaning the concern has to him.  But is that all?  I'm not very good at doing the old psychoanalyst thing of deflecting all questions, and mostly I do answer questions when they are asked of me.  This can present a really sticky situation because one can not think of any clinical scenario in which it would be therapeutic to have a therapist tell a patient, 'Yes, you're boring, OMG are you boring,' or 'No, in fact, I don't like you.'  And not answering could be viewed as negative response by the patient --if you liked me, you'd tell me, so clearly you don't like me.  So if the exploration of the question doesn't take care of the issue, and the patient continues to ask, what's a shrink to do?

I'm not in favor of lying to patients, therapy is about having an honest relationship, but our readers have given some great examples.  If a gunman asks for your money, is it okay to lie and say you have none?  Is it okay to lie about whether you've been the victim of sexual abuse on a job application (one reader saw this!).  Just because someone asks, do you need to answer truthfully?  Of course, you can be truthful and say you don't plan to answer that question, but so many times, the assumption is that the answer must be Yes because if not, you'd have nothing to hide.


Psychiatrists don't owe it to their patients to be totally transparent.  Shrinks have the right to their privacy, and professional boundaries dictate that it's wrong to share your problems with your patients (even if they ask). 


That being said, it still can feel very uncomfortable on the shrink side of a couch when a boring patient asks if they are boring.  What would you say?

Missed Opportunities?

Before I begin,  I wanted to let you know that ClinkShrink wrote a post called Can You Tame Wild Women? over on our Shrink Rap News blog this week. 
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When we talk about psychotherapy, one aspect of what we look at is the process of what occurs in the therapeutic relationship.  This is an important part of psychodynamic-based psychotherapy, meaning psychotherapy that is derived from the theories put forth by Freud.  Psychoanalysis (the purest form of psychodynamic psychotherapy) includes an emphasis on events that occurred during childhood, and a focus on understanding what goes on in the relationship between the therapist and the patient, including the transference and counter-transference. 


In some of our posts, our friend Jesse has commented about how it's important to understand what transpires in the mind of the patient when certain things are said and done.  Let me tell you that Jesse is a wonderful psychiatrist, he is warm and caring and attentive and gentle, and he's had extensive training in the analytic method, he's on my list of who I go to when I need help, so while I want to discuss this concept, I don't want anyone, especially Jesse, to think I don't respect him.  With that disclaimer.....


On my tongue-in-cheek post on What to Get Your Psychiatrist for the Holidays, Jesse wrote: 

 When I say the Shrink should look at the context, even in small matters a gift might come with a subtext: "I just told you some terrible things about me and I want to be sure you still like me." It can be a bribe. It can be a seduction. It can simply be a gift given out of gratitude. The important concept is that we think about everything. Unlike a physical examination done by an internist, everything that occurs might be some window into how we can help the patient, and we do not want to lose that opportunity.

So wait, the patient comes to me because he symptoms of a mental disorder, often depression or anxiety, or problems controlling his behavior, or he's overwhelmed with stress and isn't coping well. Why is it so important that we understand every aspect of the sub-texted interactions?  How does this cure mental illness?  Why is it bad to accept (or not) a gift and move on?  Why do we have to think about everything?  And if it's really important, won't it come up again?  Is it really crucial that we not lose that opportunity?  Maybe I just want to take the cookies and say 'thank you' because

•   A) I don't want to hurt my patient's feelings,
•   B) it can be difficult to look at the meaning without upsetting the patient or putting the patient on the defensive and so the patient has to be fully on-board for this type of therapy and those patients generally don't bring gifts (ah, maybe we should be asking all analytic patients why they didn't bring gifts, now that might yield interesting information), and 
•   C) I like cookies.

So the truth is that on these posts, the comments are always the most interesting part, so do write in and let me know what you think, not specifically about the cookie/holiday gift example, but about how important it is to understand the interactions that occur within the context of the psychotherapeutic relationship.  


Just so everyone knows that I am still Jesse's friend, I am posting the video he sent me of his late grand-chinchilla, Chinstrap.  And yes, Jesse had a grand-chinchilla.  He does assure me that Chinstrap was having a good time in this video, because I wondered. 




And I'd like to thank Steve over at Thought Broadcast for providing the graphic for today's post.  

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