AUSTIN, TEX. – Providers are no more likely to put an involuntary psychiatric hold on someone who is pregnant than not unless she is using substances, recent research shows.
“This raises a question regarding who psychiatrists consider to be their patients: the mother, the unborn child, or both?” Samuel J. House, MD, of the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, said at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL).
Dr. House sent out a survey to members of the AAPL to learn their attitudes toward involuntary psychiatric holds on pregnant women, with and without evidence of substance use, and he presented the results at the meeting.
“We know that the rates of involuntary hospitalizations very widely” across different jurisdictions and practice settings, Dr. House said, but research has shown that age, unmarried status, psychotic symptoms, aggression, and a low level of social function are associated with involuntary commitment. He wanted to explore where pregnancy fit.
Dr. House became interested in clinicians’ perspectives on this issue when he realized how few psychiatric holds he saw among pregnant women during the 4 years he spent at a university hospital’s level 1 trauma center. He included questions about substance use in his survey because of the “recent push to criminalize substance use during pregnancy, mainly in response to the significant impact substance use during pregnancy can have on the fetus or developing child,” he said.
Dr. House received 68 survey responses from AAPL members, most of whom were male with an average age of 47 years. The 7-question survey presented various clinical scenarios and asked what the respondent would do.
The first question concerned being called to the emergency department to evaluate a 28-year-old white woman with clinical signs of depression, history of a suicide attempt, and a mother who had committed suicide when the patient was 15. However, she states during evaluation: “I could never actually kill myself. My family would be too upset, and I would go to hell.”
Two-thirds of respondents (67.6%) said they would admit the woman to an inpatient unit for stabilization, and the others would discharge her with close follow-up.
The second question asked what the clinician would do if the patient declined admission: 41.2% would discharge, and 58.8% would place the woman on a psychiatric hold.