Category: Systems

Categories
Education Homelessness Lessons Medicine Nonfiction Policy Reflection Systems

Involuntary Commitment (VII).

This post is overdue by one year! It may help to review the third scenario and a primer on involuntary commitment before reading on.

Why the delay? Because I still wrestle with the question at the end of this post.

Recall in the third scenario the man, described as a chronic inebriate, who frequently tried to kill himself while intoxicated. He recently had slapped a woman in a laundromat and had thrown a can of soda at outreach workers. How would you apply involuntary commitment criteria here?

1. Does this person want to harm himself or someone else?

While intoxicated, he has said that he wants to kill himself and we know that he has, in fact, harmed other people: He slapped a woman in the laundromat and he threw a can of soda at some outreach workers. While these may be minor insults in the grand scheme of things, they still suggest that he is disinhibited enough potentially harm someone.

2. How imminent is this risk of harm to self or others?

Probably imminent. Since he is frequently intoxicated, he is frequently disinhibited.

3. Are these behaviors due to a psychiatric condition?

Maybe.

Is an alcohol use disorder a psychiatric condition?

Think about your answer again.

Though “alcohol use disorder” is listed as a condition in DSM-5, some would argue that it is not a psychiatric condition. They would say that it is a choice. They would also argue that the mental disturbance that comes from alcohol use is temporary while “true” psychiatric conditions do not have the same cause-and-effect phenomena that we often see with alcohol.

However, we also know that this man has reported auditory hallucinations in the past and, regardless if his alcohol use is a psychiatric condition or not, his intoxication is clearly affecting his ability to function.

At least that is how I formulated it.

Related: Will hospitalization help treat the underlying psychiatric condition?

Possibly. The likelihood that he can become intoxicated with alcohol in the hospital is very low (but not impossible).

What actually happened?

The man was going around in circles from emergency room to street to jail. The police wanted him admitted to the hospital because the only time the police weren’t picking him up was when he was sober, which was when he was in the hospital. The outreach team had housing for him (he could have moved in tomorrow!), but he was too intoxicated to accept the invitations.

There was a big meeting and we concocted a big plan: The outreach team would find and talk with the man in the park in five days at 11am. He would likely be intoxicated and belligerent by then. The police would meet us there. The police would help transport the man to the hospital on an involuntary order. The emergency department staff would admit him to the hospital, whether he agreed to or not. Once he received treatment in the hospital, he would be discharged into his own apartment, with hopes that he would stay off the streets and away from alcohol.

What could go wrong?

On the appointed day, we found him in the park.

“Hey hey hey,” he said, putting his arm around the outreach worker, a goofy grin on his face. He offered the 40-ounce can of beer to us. “It’s the first one. Half full. I’m an optimist.” He laughed.

My heart was starting to sink: Even though he slapped a woman and threw a can of soda at someone less than a week ago, he wasn’t doing anything right now that would warrant an involuntary hospitalization.

But the show must go on, right? Multiple people and systems were involved. We had a big plan. And going through with the plan would be in his best interests, right?

Right?

“So,” the outreach worker started, “what do you think about going to the hospital with us?”

He laughed. “I don’t need to go to the hospital. I’m fine.”

“The doctors can check your health, make sure everything is okay….”

“Naw, don’t need it. I feel fine.”

Indeed. He was buzzed, but that wasn’t a reason to go to the hospital.

He looked over our shoulders, smiled, and shouted, “HEY!”

Behind us were four men with broad shoulders and thick legs. We all recognized them as police officers, though they were wearing casual clothes. They nodded at us.

“Wanna go to that bar with me?” the man asked, pointing to the brick building down the street.

“Sure!” the police said, chuckling. “It’s 11am.”

The outreach worker and I stood by our car and watched them disappear into the bar. We said nothing. Still nothing had happened that would warrant hospitalization, voluntary or not.

Several minutes later, the police officers and the man emerged from the bar. The man was singing:

Hello!
Is it me you’re looking for?
’cause I wonder where you are
And I wonder what you do
Are you somewhere feeling lonely?
Or is someone loving you?

The officers started laughing. Everyone was having a good time.

The police led the man to a squad car and opened the back door.

“We’re going to the hospital.”

“F@ck no,” the man said, smiling, having no idea what was happening. My heart sank further.

“Get into the car.”

“No!”

“Look, get into the car—”

—and that’s when he spit at a police officer.

WHAM! It happened so fast that I couldn’t believe what happened. They threw him against the hood of the police car. Two officers pinned his arms down. The other two looked ready to strike him.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Pedestrians began to rubberneck. Some young men began to call, “What did he do? Why you doing that?”

“It’s none of your business. Keep walking. There’s nothing to see here,” a police officer barked.

“No, that ain’t right. Why did you do that?”

A woman with flowers in her grey hair and a flowing peasant dress around her thin frame approached.

“That’s police brutality, that’s what. We need to get rid of the cops.”

In the meantime, the police officers had handcuffed the man—for what? for what?—and placed a mesh bag over his head so that if he tried to spit again, the netting would catch it.[1. This mesh bag is called a “spit sack”.] They pushed him into the back of the car and closed the door.

The crowd on the sidewalk grew. Close to three dozen people started to shout and chant at the police officers.

The outreach worker and I got into our car. What was happening?

The ambulance the police had called arrived. A paramedic got out and, hands on his hips, talked with one of the police officers. His brow was furrowed and he was frowning. The officer shrugged, then pointed to our car.

The paramedic walked over and knocked on my window. I rolled it down.

“What did this man do? Why are we taking him to the hospital? Did he actually do anything that warrants an involuntary transport?”

My cheeks burned.

“No.”

The paramedic[2. God bless this paramedic. We need people like him to ask these questions.] glared at me. He then turned around and walked away.

The police and paramedics moved him from the back of the police car into the ambulance while the crowd continued to bristle. The ambulance honked as it tried to weave through the crowd.

After the police drove away, the crowd dispersed.

The outreach worker and I sat in our car in silence. My cheeks were still burning.

He was in the hospital for about two weeks. The first three days were against his will. He agreed to stay in the hospital for the remaining 11 days.

The outreach worker met the man when he was discharged from the hospital to escort him to his apartment. He attended AA meetings four days a week. He took his two medications every night. He saw his counselor every week.

He avoided the park. The police started calling our office: “We never see him anymore. Do you know what happened?”

I never saw the man again, though heard occasional updates from his psychiatrist. The man didn’t drink any alcohol for nearly a year. When he did slip, he asked to go to the hospital. The police never got involved.

Even now, I still ask myself, “Did we do the right thing?”

Categories
Education Medicine Observations Policy Seattle Systems

A Primer on Psychiatric Boarding.

The Washington State Supreme Court recently stated that “psychiatric boarding” is unconstitutional.[1. You can read the court’s opinion here. It’s a fairly easy read.] I agree with and support the court’s decision. “Boarding” is a terrible practice.

To be clear, though, the consequences of this decision may be undesirable.

Some background: In the state of Washington, the only people who can hospitalize individuals against their will for psychiatric reasons are “designated mental health professionals” (DMHPs). Police officers can bring people to emergency rooms against their wills and physicians and other professionals can evaluate people who show distress. A DMHP, as an agent of the state, makes the ultimate decision whether to detain someone against his will.

Let’s be clear about this: Being hospitalized against your will is stressful, upsetting, and frightening. The state is taking away the rights and freedoms from an individual. Civil liberties? Gone. It is a big deal. No one enjoys the process.

In order for a DMHP to hospitalize someone against his will, a person first must show evidence of a “mental disorder”.[2. A finer point about “showing evidence of a mental disorder” is that there should be some proof that hospitalization is an effective treatment for the mental disorder in question. This is why some people go to jail and not to the hospital. This path can lead us into the weeds.] Having a mental disorder alone, however, is not reason enough to hospitalize someone against his will. At least one of the following three criteria must also apply:

  • He is a danger to himself. (Consider a man with major depression who was found nearly unconscious; a noose made of bedsheets was around his neck.)
  • He is a danger to others. (Consider the woman who is walking across the highway multiple times because she believes that God wants her to proselytize to the drivers.)
  • He shows “grave disability”, or is unable to meet his basic needs. (Consider the man who has not eaten any food in nearly two weeks because he believes that all food is actually composed of his internal organs.)[3. If you think that none of these scenarios ever really happen, I encourage you to go volunteer at your local emergency room.]

Thus, at least two people–the person who wanted the individual to go to the hospital and the DMHP–were concerned enough about the individual to believe that he needed to be in the hospital to get care.[4. For now, let us put aside arguments that psychiatric hospitalization is never helpful or indicated. Some people believe that psychiatric hospitalization is a veiled form of incarceration.]

That “to get care” part is the crucial point when we talk about “boarding”.

People who are involuntarily detained in Washington are only allowed to be hospitalized in certain facilities (or certain beds). Facilities submit an application to the state to become a “certified” place where they can treat people who are hospitalized against their wills.[5. Indeed, there are psychiatric hospitals in Washington State that are not certified to treat people who are hospitalized against their wills.] These places can be entire buildings (called “evaluation and treatment facilities”, or “E&Ts”, here). They can also be specific beds within a hospital, usually on psychiatric wards.

There has been concern if “inpatient psychiatric capacity is sufficient to meet [a] potential increased demand” for involuntary hospitalizations. All certified beds are frequently occupied. Most people who are referred for involuntary hospitalization are not in psychiatric hospitals; they are in hospital emergency rooms.

There are medical centers (and, by extension, hospital emergency rooms) in Washington State that do not have any psychiatric providers on staff.

Thus, DMHPs have been hospitalizing people against their wills, but no certified treatment beds are available. These detained individuals therefore are admitted to hospital emergency rooms or random hospital wards while they wait for certified beds to open up.

If the hospital does not have psychiatric providers on staff, that means these detained individuals don’t receive any psychiatric care. People could wait hours, days, or even weeks before they are transferred to a certified facility to receive formal psychiatric services.

In the meantime, these individuals are often physically restrained to their beds. There might not be enough hospital staff to fulfill the state’s mandate that they remain in the hospital against their wills.

Sometimes these individuals receive doses of sedating medication for multiple days in a row. (Imagine you work in an emergency department. Someone who is detained in your emergency department will not stop screaming obscenities at other patients. He also tries to spit at everyone. He has also tries to punch the nurses whenever they walk by.)

This isn’t treatment. (Remember, the state ordered that this person be hospitalized against his will to get care.)

Thus, you can now see why the state supreme court decreed that it is not okay to “board” psychiatric patients. People who are detained against their will, by the state’s definition, need treatment. “Boarding” isn’t treatment.

This is why I agree with and support the court’s decision.

However, now that you know that there aren’t enough certified psychiatric beds in the state, you can guess what undesirable consequences might come from this decision.

The detained individual in the emergency room who yells and tries to punch all the nurses? Now he might end up in jail on charges of assault. Jail is not a therapeutic environment. Some jails do not offer any psychiatric services. Incarceration, like boarding, is not treatment.

Detained individuals might instead be released into the community if no certified beds are available at that time. Someone else–another police officer, another family member–might try to re-refer them back to the hospital a few hours after they were released. This results in a cycle in and out of hospitals and other institutions. That isn’t treatment, either.

Hospitals that have certified beds may feel pressure to discharge people more quickly due to the heightened demand. These individuals may not have recovered “enough” and may return to the hospital much sooner than anyone would like.

Another potential consequence is that those individuals who seek hospital services on their own–perhaps in an effort to avoid involuntary hospitalization–may not be able to get into a hospital at all. Those detained against their wills may occupy all of the certified hospital beds.

My understanding is that the state is considering various ways to work with the new law: This includes increasing the number of certified beds, creating different options to divert people from hospitals, and reducing the amount of referrals for involuntary hospitalization.

I don’t understand why some hospitals don’t employ psychiatrists.[6. Psychiatric services are not “revenue generators”, so I suspect this is the reason why some hospitals don’t hire psychiatrists.] If a pregnant woman about to have a baby shows up at an emergency room, hospitals have staff available with the expertise to manage her care.

Why isn’t this the case with psychiatry?

Categories
Homelessness Seattle Systems

Did You Nominate Me for Seattle Mag’s Community Service Award?

Hey, there’s a short blurb in Seattle Magazine about my work during the past two years:

Top Docs ’14: Community Service Award Winners

Scroll down to “The Bridge”. (If you want the source that “more than 60 percent of chronically homeless people in cities nationwide face lifelong mental health problems”, it’s here.)

Thank you to whoever nominated me! (Please tell me who you are.) It was an delightful surprise.

(In the meantime, I’m asking readers for help for post ideas on Facebook and Twitter. I welcome your suggestions.)

Categories
Blogosphere Medicine Observations Policy Systems

Why I Work at the Fringe.

This article is making the rounds among physicians on Twitter. Much of the information in the article, unfortunately, is accurate.

For some of the reasons stated there, I left the “traditional” health care system and pursued work at the “fringe”.

Part of this is due to my clinical interests: I like working at the intersections of different fields. For example, I like the intersection of psychiatry and hospital medicine, which is called psychosomatic medicine. Another example is my interest in public psychiatry, which focuses on the intersection of social factors and mental health (e.g., individuals with psychiatric and substance use conditions in the context of homelessness and poverty).[1. Really, though, all of medicine could be “psychosomatic medicine” or “public psychiatry”; the divisions between mind, body, and environment are arbitrary.]

Part of this, though, was my sense that the system would not let me be the kind of doctor I want to be.

For a brief period I worked in a clinic where I had slots for four new intakes a day (60 minutes each) and 15-minute follow-up appointments for the rest of the day. If my schedule was completely filled with follow-up appointments, I could have seen up to 34 patients a day. (I never got to this point because I quit well before my panel got full.)

In reality, the 15-minute appointments were 12-minute appointments. I needed about three minutes to type out some notes to myself for clinical documentation.[2. I don’t like typing my note while I am seeing a patient. I’m not fully attending to either one when I do that.]

Because I was building a new practice, people with a wide variety of conditions and concerns came to see me. I was advised to refer patients out of the medical center who were “too sick”. This included individuals who were frequently in and out of psychiatric hospitals, had significant psychiatric symptoms, or otherwise had other stressors in their lives that made them “difficult“.

In other words, they told me to refer out the people who needed specialist care the most.

The reality, too, was that no psychiatrist could provide quality care to these individuals in 12 minutes. Imagine someone with depression so severe that he lacks the energy or interest to share his current distress with you. Or someone who is psychotic and insists that her ex-husband is tracking her through all the electronics in her home. Or someone who is so anxious about leaving his house that his attendance to the clinic is worthy of celebration.

Obtaining an accurate history guides diagnosis, which then guides treatment. An insufficient history can thus lead to haphazard interventions. You can see how the 15-minute appointment model results in heavy reliance upon (potentially unnecessary) medications. If someone says he feels depressed, it’s difficult to validate his emotional experience, provide education about his condition and non-pharmacological ways to manage it (e.g., behavioral activation, sleep hygiene, etc.), and have a discussion about medications, which should always include risks, benefits, and alternatives, in 12 minutes.

It is much easier to write a script and ask someone to return in a month. (This inspired my post about the Automated Psychiatrist Machine.)

Furthermore, this clinic was in a medical center with a group of primary care physicians. Primary care doctors referred their patients with diagnoses of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to the psychiatry clinic (as they should). These individuals, however, were “too sick”. Never mind that, unlike the primary care physicians, we psychiatrists had the training to diagnose, treat, and manage these individuals with significant psychiatric conditions.

Thus, these patients often returned to their poor primary care physicians, who tried to care for them the best they could… which often entailed medication regimens that were unnecessary. (Primary care physicians deserve no blame for this: How are they supposed to know?)

This clinic also “rewarded” psychiatrists for “productivity”. The more patients a psychiatrist saw, the more money the psychiatrist would earn. This led to “cherry-picking” patients. Psychiatrists would keep patients who either had minor conditions or symptoms that had resolved, because those are the patients you can adequately see in 12 minutes. As a consequence, patients with more debilitating symptoms could not access the clinic. The psychiatrists had no incentives in either time or money to send these “cherry-picked” patients back to their primary care doctors.

My frustration and disillusionment compelled me to leave the job. I returned to positions at the “fringe” to work with patients who often are also not part of the system or patients that the system had failed. Consider the man who has been homeless for the past ten years and is too paranoid to access any health care service. Or the woman who was beaten and molested as a child, sent to foster care and group homes, never completed high school, “aged out” of youth care, and now has no resources or support.

I couldn’t wait for the system to change, so I sought out settings where both my skills would be useful and I could be the kind of doctor I want to be. There may not be many physician jobs at the “fringe” and certainly not all physicians want to work there. When we physicians vote with our feet, though, we show what we value, the kind of care patients deserve, and how the system must change.

Categories
Consult-Liaison Education Lessons Medicine Systems

Have You Thanked Your Nurse Today?

As I noted earlier, hospitals permit around-the-clock observation of patients. If you don’t need around-the-clock monitoring, you don’t need to be in the hospital.[1. “But what about ‘social admits’?” you may cry. “They don’t need to be in the hospital, but we admit them anyway.” True. “Social admits” reflect the intersections of social policy, politics, health, economics, and the lack of resources. That topic is beyond the scope of this post.]

Who is doing this around-the-clock monitoring? Nurses.

Therefore, whether you are a patient or a physician, one of the best things you can do is get on the good side of the nurses.

If you are a patient, a nurse watches over you and your care. Nurses make sure that you won’t fall. They make sure they give the right dose of the right medication in the right route to the right person at the right time (which can be easier said than done). Nurses provide education about medicines, tests, and health conditions. They make sure you know what day it is, where you are, and who you are. (Also easier said than done.) They monitor your progress and try to ensure that your health only improves. Nurses can also page the doctor for you or your family. They can find out when you are scheduled to go through a procedure. They can find out what you are waiting for. Nurses advocate for you.

Sometimes it may seem like they’re not “doing” anything. They are. They’re keeping an eye on what is happening with your health.

If you are a physician, you must already recognize the value of nurses. (If you are a medical student or resident and have fantasies that, one day, you will be “running the show”, don’t be a fool: There is no way you could do your work in the hospital without the help of nurses.) Nurses serve as our eyes and ears. They tell us information about patients that patients themselves cannot or will not tell us. They do triage with us when we have multiple patients who are not doing well simultaneously. They tell us if someone is starting to look a lot worse… or a lot better.

While it is true that nurses provide around-the-clock observation of patients in hospitals, it is also true that nurses provide around-the-clock monitoring of doctors in hospitals.

Nurses know when doctors typically meet with patients. They know which doctors are more likely to spend time with patients and answer questions. They know which doctors work in collaboration with nurses and which ones treat them like second-class citizens. They know which doctors return pages promptly. Nurses quickly learn how to alter their approaches with various doctors to get work done.

This is yet another reason why, as a patient, you want to get on the good side of nurses. Nurses manage doctors. Skilled nurses will know how to work with different doctors to help you get what you want (e.g., answers to your questions, a meeting with your family, better pain control).

(Patients, you should also know that nurses also manage you. Nurses tell doctors which patients yell at nurses, which family members are berating them, which patients are trying hard to follow recommendations, and which family members left cookies and treats for them.)

Physicians, thank your nurses for helping you do your job better. Positive reinforcement and good manners go a long way. The more you acknowledge the skills and efforts of your nurses, the more they will want to work with you and make your job easier.

Patients, thank your nurses for watching over you. Nurses play an essential role in your care in the hospital. Be kind to them. The more you acknowledge the skills and efforts of your nurses, the more they will want to work with you to get you back to health as soon as possible.