Category: Medicine

Categories
Consult-Liaison Medicine

Coping Skills.

Grayscale photo of 11 tall clocks all reading the same time within a grove of trees.
Photo by Pixabay

I recently had a dental procedure that involved local anesthesia. I watched the dentist do her work through the reflection on the examination light. Though I didn’t see the drill, my entire head vibrated from my mouth. The gel she swabbed on my teeth was dark purple; for a few moments, it looked like she had removed them. The tip of the light that bonded the composite material first glowed a neon yellow, then flashed into nightlight blue. I left the office with a facial deformity and a speech impediment, though, thankfully, both disappeared as the anesthetic wore off.

(Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are amazing.)

Dissociation is a useful coping skill at the dentist’s office. Though I was watching her work on the teeth in my mouth, the anesthetic left me feeling disjointed sensations: pressure and vibration, but no pain. Was this actually happening? My throat reflexively swallowed when the saliva began to pool; sometimes I tasted the metallic salinity of blood—my blood. But was this actually happening to me? My hands rested on my belly, like small boats of muscle, flesh, and bone floating on slow waves of abdominal breathing. A woman whose face I could not see was sanding down teeth. Were those actually my teeth?

When the dentist announced that she was done, I rejoined my body in space and time within one or two eyeblinks. Everything—except for the small, numb portion of my mouth—had reintegrated.

Problems arise when we only have one coping skill to deal with life’s myriad stressors. Imagine disconnecting from time during a job interview or separating from reality when a friend is in distress and needs your help. The interviewer may assume that you are inattentive or intoxicated. Your friend may come to believe that you are unreliable and unresponsive. Doors you wanted to walk through close.

Imagine that any time a challenge appears, the only way you can deal with it is by disconnecting in space, time, and identity. Gone are the abilities to ask for help, defend yourself, or protect people you care about. You just disappear.

Sometimes people end up relying on only one coping skill because it was the only skill that was useful—and lifesaving—in the past. Consider the child who grows up with a father who drinks large volumes of alcohol. When he starts roaring and the dishes shatter against walls near and far, hiding and dissociating are protective. And what if he drinks to this point of loathing and destruction most nights of the week? It seems safer to feel nothing at all rather than terror and tense muscles all the time.

The skills we use frequently—intentionally or not—are the skills we come to rely on.

Categories
Medicine Policy Public health psychiatry

Recent Readings.

(Note: There are two purposes to this post: One, to get back into a routine of writing and posting. Two, I moved my website to a different host (those of you viewing the actual website will see that the design is different). Because it will never be perfect (because what is?), I am posting as a public test to fix what needs to be fixed.)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve read recently, some of which are prompts for future posts here:

NPR: Stressed out about climate change? 4 ways to tackle both the feelings and the issues. I am largely unfamiliar with the literature on psychiatric conditions and climate change, though have read a paper or two (not recently) about the association of increased violence among people with increases in temperatures. I must also confess that that my current faith in psychiatry to address this in a practical way is brittle: Organized psychiatry (in the United States, at least) seemed unenthusiastic about supporting population mental health during the pandemic. Despite the urgent mental health consequences of Covid-19, organized psychiatry in the US seemed instead enamored with the topic in the next bullet point.

Wired: Is the Psychedelic Therapy Bubble About to Burst? A new paper argues that excitement has veered into misinformation—and scientists should be the ones to set things straight. I find myself feeling annoyed with the mushrooming ecstasy related to psilocybin and LSD (see what I did there?), among others. There are a number of reasons for this; I will be the first to state that some of my reasons are not valid. Much of my irritation stems from the limited evidence (at this time) to support psychedelics for more severe conditions, the limited number of people who can actually access this intervention (who can afford this? who has eight hours to spend with two therapists?), and why We as a Society do not instead invest in population-level interventions so fewer people will develop trauma-, depression-, and anxiety-related conditions (e.g., ensuring children aren’t hungry; supporting literacy and education so people have skills for employment; etc.).

The Hill: Suffering from burnout, doctors are working drunk or high on the job: report. A new report found the health care industry has been too slow to address its mental health crisis among doctors and nurses and often treats mental health as secondary to physical health. “Over the last three months, 1 in 7 physicians admitted to consuming alcohol or controlled substances at work.” This data came from interviews from a mental health company, so there’s potentially a lot of bias in the results. I am sorry to say, though, that I wasn’t surprised to learn this. Some health care workers were drinking or using controlled substances at work before the pandemic.

n+1: Lab-Leak Theory and the “Asiatic” Form. What is missing is a motive. I did not find this to be an easy read, though it engaged me enough that I was able to get through it. In short, the author, Andrew Liu, argues that the appeal of Covid-19 coming from a lab leak is a reflection of historical (and ongoing?) exoticization of the Orient, as well as fears of China’s economic power.

New York Times: Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. and Truthout: I Stole to Feed My Family and Was Incarcerated. We Need Resources, Not Prisons. I am not an abolitionist, though there are days when I wish I could be successfully persuaded to become one. (This reflects what appears to be my declining idealism as I age.) To be clear, I do not think incarceration has been or is an effective solution for many (and maybe most?) behaviors and problems. This conclusion comes from my experience working in a jail and with people who are poor and marginalized. However, examples easily come to mind for how law enforcement and incarceration have had some value: Consider Jeffrey Epstein or Ted Bundy. I don’t know what the answer is, though I do not think either pole (e.g., police state or abolition) are useful or desired solutions. I am open to changing my mind. (Related: This Twitter thread on the role of child protective services.)

New Yorker: The Lottery. Shirley Jackson wrote this short story in 1948 and I only learned of it in 2022! If you’ve never heard of it before, please go read it: It has excellent structure, which helps drive the story to its haunting and disturbing conclusion.

Categories
COVID-19 Education Medicine Nonfiction Observations

Three Observations.

I. He was standing outside of the homeless shelter. The bouquet of bright tulips in his hand were splashes of color against the tired cement walls and grey skies.

A man staying in the shelter ambled towards him. “Hi,” he greeted, his eyes gazing at the buds of the young tulips. “Is today a good day or a bad day?”

The shelter manager laughed and warmly responded, “Why are you asking me that?”

“Because you got flowers….” the man said.

After a pause, the shelter manager reassured, “These are ‘congratulations’ flowers.”

“Oh, okay, good,” the man said. The wrinkles around his eyes revealed the smile that his mask obscured. “Congratulations.”

II. Earlier this year, I wrote:

We know from history that pandemics do not last forever. The 1918 flu pandemic lasted just over two years. The 2002 SARS outbreak was declared over in less than two years. The 2013 Ebola epidemic persisted for less than three years. All things change, all things end.

By the end of 2020, I had already read some literature about protecting mental health during epidemics. This information gave me confidence to share with others that, yes, pandemics do end in two to three years’ time.

Last month, I finally embraced “that the Covid pandemic will likely end for the majority of people in the US before it ends for those of us who work in and use safety net programs“. And only in the past week did I finally recognize that these past epidemics and pandemics of course did not end in two to three years. That just seems to be the duration of time that societies can tolerate abrupt social restrictions and consequences.

I interpreted the published timelines as start and end dates of biological phenomena.

I feel foolish for having done so. Time is an artificial construct, so of course the expiration dates of pandemics are artificial constructs, too.

Someone somewhere can explain why two to three years is the maximum amount of time that people and societies can tolerate drastic changes before reverting “back to normal”. Of course, there is no way any of us can ever go “back”, pandemic or not.

III. The author of this tweet has since deleted it for reasons that will be apparent (profile photo modified by yours truly):

The tweet is dehumanizing, but that’s not actually the chief reason why this struck me.

The author of this tweet is a Big Name in the field of psychiatry. He is the chair of a Fancy Pants psychiatry department at a Hoity-Toity institution. He’s published seminal papers in the field related to psychotic disorders.

Over ten years ago I completed a fellowship at this institution (this is not meant to be a humblebrag, I promise) and I have a distinct memory from when Dr. Big Name when he spoke at the graduation ceremony. He grasped both sides of the lectern, leaned forward in his dark suit, and glowered at the audience.

“As a graduate of This Place, you now have a responsibility to This Place. Whatever you say, whatever you do, is a reflection on us. Make sure you don’t ever do anything that will reflect poorly on This Place.”

It was strange and uncomfortable. His warning about reputation management during a rite of passage was, in of itself, something that didn’t reflect well on That Place. Which is exactly why this memory resurfaced when I saw his tweet.

May God spare all of us and may we all avoid these errors, in public and in private.

Categories
COVID-19 Homelessness Medicine Seattle

Surge.

When I was younger, my intention was to become an infectious disease doctor. Forces, seen and unseen, pulled me into psychiatry.

My undergraduate studies were in microbiology, virology, and immunology. Had someone told me twenty years ago that I would someday use that knowledge on a daily basis, I would have shrugged and said, “Well, that makes sense. That’s the plan, right?”

Had someone told me ten years ago that I would use knowledge from my undergraduate studies during a pandemic, I would have snorted: “But now I work as a psychiatrist. And a pandemic? What are you talking about?”

Had someone told me two years ago that I, as a psychiatrist, would be leading a public health response for a homelessness services agency during a global pandemic, I would have furrowed my brow: “What are you talking about?”

And here we are.

We’ve never had so many people—staff and patients—test positive for Covid at one time during the pandemic as we have in the past three days. Thankfully, most have had only mild symptoms and none, thus far, have needed hospital-level care.

The work we’re doing for Covid isn’t as intense or heartbreaking as the work my colleagues are doing in emergency departments and hospitals. Never before had I thought that a homelessness services agency could play a vital role in prevention and early intervention.

And here we are.

Throughout the pandemic, our team has framed our efforts as one way to keep people out of emergency departments and hospitals. These could be our humble contribution to our colleagues working in inpatient settings. We have been largely successful, though I worry that our luck is running out.

We continue to witness the indirect effects of the pandemic. Some have been lethal: Suicides and overdoses, whether intentional or not. Some are worrisome: More irritability and increasing intolerance for the challenges and annoyances of life, regardless of one’s station. I wince when I consider what might come next as we witness this surge of cases.

God have mercy on us all.

Categories
Consult-Liaison Education Medicine Nonfiction Systems

More Annotations on the Britney Spears Transcript.

I have not paid close attention to news about Ms. Britney Spears’s conservatorship over the years, though was interested to learn what she recently had to say about it. I felt both sad and disturbed after I read her remarks. (Here’s an audio recording, too.)

To be clear, I don’t know anything about her, her diagnoses, or the specific details of medical care she has received. Despite spending most of my career working with people with conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, cognitive impairment, substance use disorders, and often major medical conditions, I have referred very few people for guardianship… and none of them presented like Ms. Spears. I have never provided care to public figures or similar VIPs.

Following are the reactions and questions I had upon reading the annotated transcript of her testimony, for your consideration:

They all said I wasn’t participating in rehearsals and I never agreed to take my medication, which, my medication is only taken in the mornings, never at rehearsal.

I don’t know what medications she takes. If she is referring to any psychiatric medication here, this hopefully suggests that her medications cause only minimal, if any, sedation. Many medications usually prescribed for conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can make people feel tired, sleepy, or sluggish, particularly when people first start taking them.

I was told by my at-the-time therapist — Dr. Benson, who died — that my manager called him in that moment and told him that I wasn’t cooperating or following the guidelines in rehearsals.

I don’t know the terms of her conservatorship, though it is uncommon for managers to be able to call a patient’s therapist or doctor. Can you imagine if your boss were able to call your doctor to report that you weren’t “cooperating or following guidelines”?

Maybe there are releases on information on file for her manager and doctor to talk to each other, though most people don’t want to mix their personal and professional lives like this. That being said, I have had friends or parents of people under my care call me to share information with me, though they understood that I would say nothing in response. I’ve never had a teacher or boss call me, though.

And he also said I wasn’t taking my medication, which is so dumb because I’ve had the same lady every morning for the past eight years give me my same medication, and I’m nowhere near these stupid people.

So many questions here! Who is this “same lady”? Is this a health care professional, like a nurse? For “every morning”? For the “past eight years”? Does she actually need someone to give her medications every morning? Is she unable to do this herself? (This seems unlikely if she is able to “[rehearse] four days a week”, “[direct] most of the show”, and “[do] most of the choreography”.) Or is the purpose of this “lady” to enforce and report compliance? The usual goal is to help promote people’s autonomy and independence, since no one wants to undergo monitoring like this… especially for eight years!

Presumably this “lady” is also using a medication administration record for Ms. Spears so there is written proof of what she is or is not taking. This might be one way the therapist would know that she “wasn’t taking [her] medication”.

Three days later, after I said no to Vegas, my therapist sat me down in a room and said that he had a million phone calls about how I was not cooperating in rehearsals, and I haven’t been taking my medication. All this was false.

An accurate and truthful medication adherence record would provide proof to both Ms. Spears and her therapist about whether she was taking her medication. This is a document that attorneys, judges, and other people could review.

He immediately, the next day, put me on lithium, out of nowhere. He took me off my normal meds I’ve been on for five years…

If I am reading this right, this means she was under medication administration monitoring for eight years and had been taking the same medications for at least five years (though she said eight years earlier). This suggests a stable medication regimen that she was able to tolerate.

… lithium is a very, very strong and completely different medication compared to what I was used to.

Lithium started at aggressive doses can indeed be “very, very strong”. “Strong” doses of lithium are most often used for people experiencing “mania”, which is a component of bipolar disorder. “Mania” doesn’t mean someone who is “happy” or simply “euphoric”. Mania, in its more extreme forms, looks like increasing amounts of energy in the context of decreased sleep (sometimes for only a few hours, if at all) for many nights, sometimes lasting weeks. People often demonstrate significant changes in behavior during this period of time, such as spending large sums of money they don’t have (e.g., via credit cards) and doing impulsive things that are uncharacteristic of them (e.g., starting businesses with no foundation, having sex with people they don’t know, using drugs or alcohol). Sometimes these combination of behaviors are lethal: People will jump from heights, having full confidence that they can fly.

The thing is, lithium usually doesn’t work that fast. Usually people who are experiencing mania receive lithium to prevent the next episode. They also take something else (ideally for a short period of time) to treat the current episode.

You can go mentally impaired if you take too much, if you stay on it longer than five months.

I don’t know what she means here. Some people take lithium for years (decades!) and they do not “go mentally impaired”. In fact, lithium can be literally lifesaving and keep people well and out of the hospital.

Lithium at high doses, if not properly monitored, can cause sudden changes in mental status and emergency medical problems.

But he put me on that, and I felt drunk.

Yes, this can happen, particularly if the starting dose is high.

I told them I was scared and my doctor had me on — six different nurses with this new medication come to my home, stay with me to monitor me on this new medication, which I never wanted to be on to begin with. There were six different nurses in my home and they wouldn’t let me get in my car to go anywhere for a month.

Six different nurses? Who were staying with her? When people (recall that my experience is limited to non-VIPs, which makes up most of us) are in an intensive care unit (ICU) for a major medical problem, there’s ideally one nurse working with only two patients. Six nurses to one patient is a lot. Maybe she meant she worked with six different nurses, but there was only one nurse in her home at any given time?

People who start taking lithium at conservative doses don’t need this level of monitoring. People who start taking lithium are often still working, taking care of their kids, going to school, etc. When people start taking lithium in a psychiatric hospital, this intensity of monitoring doesn’t happen.

Lithium can be sedating, particularly at high doses, which might be why these nurses prohibited her from driving. But for a month? Does this mean that the dose of lithium was changing/increasing over the course of the month? Or they were overly cautious?

He acted like he didn’t know, but I was told I had to be tested over the Christmas holidays before they sent me away when my kids went home to Louisiana.

It seems that she means psychological testing here, though perhaps this also included getting blood drawn to check the amount of lithium in her blood? This latter bit is called a “lithium level”. As noted above, high levels of lithium can be toxic, so people who take lithium get “lithium levels” drawn on a routine basis to ensure that the levels are not near/at toxic levels. Lithium can also affect the function of kidneys and the thyroid gland, so health care professionals often check these labs, too. If the blood draw doesn’t show any lithium, then that means the person hasn’t been taking it.

Over the two-week holiday, a lady came into my home for four hours a day, sat me down and did a psych test on me. It took forever. But I was told I had to. Then, after I got a phone call from my dad saying, after I did the psych test with this lady, basically saying I’d failed the test or whatever.

I don’t know what this is, either. Did the “psych test” last four hours? (Was it a Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5? I am skeptical: Why would someone start a medication and then do a “psych test”?)

If you don’t build rapport with people, they will provide incomplete or inaccurate information to you. The onus is on the interviewer to build rapport with the patient. I don’t know what it means to “fail” a “psych test”.

“I’m sorry, Britney, you have to listen to your doctors. They’re planning to send you to a small home in Beverly Hills to do a small rehab program that we’re going to make up for you. You’re going to pay $60,000 a month for this.”

I don’t know what “rehab program” means here. “Rehab” often refers to treatment for substance use disorders, though there are no indications to use lithium for substance use disorders. Psychiatric rehabilitation is also a thing, though this usually refers to providing education and support to people regarding social skills, gaining independence, and other strategies to prevent return to psychiatric hospitals and other intensive models of care. The goal is to keep people in the community and away from institutions.

I worked seven days a week, no days off, which in California the only similar thing to this is called sex trafficking, making anyone work, work against their will, taking all their possessions away — credit card, cash, phone, passport card — and placing them in a home where they work with the people who live with them. They all lived in the house with me — the nurses, the 24-7 security. There was one chef that came there and cooked for me daily, during the weekdays. They watched me change every day — naked — morning, noon, and night. My body — I had no privacy door for my room, I gave eight gals of blood a week.

This sounds like an extreme and unethical version of a “therapeutic community”. (The evidence supporting the application of therapeutic communities isn’t great, though some people who have gone through such programs swear by it.) This sounds more like an upscale jail, which, to be clear, is still a jail.

Humans hold less than two gallons of blood, so I don’t know what she means here. Did she undergo a lot of blood draws? To check her lithium level? To monitor whether she was using any drugs or alcohol? (Checking urine is a less invasive way of doing this.)

And ma’am, I will tell you, sitting in a chair 10 hours a day, seven days a week, it ain’t fun. And especially when you can’t walk out the front door.

If she spent most of her time “sitting in a chair”, then maybe this wasn’t a therapeutic community (and more like jail). People usually have to do chores and attend meetings in therapeutic communities. People in (non-VIP) psychiatric hospitals also don’t spend 10 hours sitting in a chair for seven days a week.

I don’t even drink alcohol — I should drink alcohol considering what they put my heart through. Also the Bridges facility they sent me to…

Today I learned about Bridges to Recovery, “residential mental health treatment in a private, luxury environment”. Is this where she went? Bridges to Recovery is part of Constellation Behavioral Health, which is owned by New MainStream Capital.

New MainStream Capital is a “private investment firm specializing in strategic equity investments in leading middle market companies with an emphasis on sustainable growth trends in both the business services and healthcare services industries.” This tells me that they are more interested in getting as much return on investment for their shareholders than providing quality care to people at Bridges to Recovery.

They have me going to therapy twice a week and a psychiatrist. I’ve never in the past had — wait, they have me going, yeah, twice a week, and Dr. [unclear] — so that’s three times a week. I’ve never in the past had to see a therapist more than once a week.

Yes, that’s a lot of therapy. People who participate in psychoanalysis go to therapy four to five times a week. However, psychoanalysis under normal circumstances is a voluntary process. (Full disclosure: I am biased against psychoanalysis.) If the psychiatrist is providing medication services only, that’s a lot of psychiatrist visits. Maybe they know a lot more than I do: How much meaningful medication tinkering can a psychiatrist do with meds every week, when the mechanism of action for so many psychiatric medications remains unknown? (Exhibit A: The serotonin hypothesis.)

I have a friend that I used to do AA meetings with. I did AA for two years. I did three meetings a week. I’ve met a bunch of women there. And I’m not able to see my friends that live eight minutes away from me, which I find extremely strange.

It sounds like Ms. Spears found AA helpful because of the support she got from her community. Much of what she reported in the transcript sounds like absence of community, which of course will have negative effects on her mental health and wellbeing.

I wanted to take the ID [IUD] out so I could start trying to have another baby. But this so-called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out because they don’t want me to have children, any more children.

Many have already commented on her statement that she is not allowed to remove her IUD and how this relates to reproductive justice. This also makes me wonder if she is taking any medications that might result in birth defects.

I am sorry to say that I have had women under my care who underwent involuntary hysterectomies due to their psychiatric conditions. All of these women were in their 70s and 80s, so none of these were recent events, but these women usually were not told that their uteruses were surgically removed until after the fact. By the time I saw them, they were taking minimal (if any) psychiatric medications and were not demonstrating symptoms that would warrant an irreversible intervention without any discussion about it.

There is so much that we don’t know about Ms. Spears and what has happened. I only hope that, if she has experienced injustice at the hands of individuals or systems, she will be vindicated and systems will change for the better.