In psychiatry, patients come to us with their list of symptoms, often a diagnosis they’ve made themselves, and the expectation that they will be given medication to fix their problem. Their diagnoses are often right on target – people often know if they are depressed or anxious, and Doctor Google may provide useful information.
Dr. Dinah Miller
Sometimes they want a specific medication, one they saw in a TV ad, or one that helped them in the past or has helped someone they know. As psychiatrists have focused more on their strengths as psychopharmacologists and less on psychotherapy, it gets easy for both the patient and the doctor to look to medication, cocktails, and titration as the only thing we do.
“My medicine stopped working,” is a line I commonly hear. Often the patient is on a complicated regimen that has been serving them well, and it seems unlikely that the five psychotropic medications they are taking have suddenly “stopped working.” An obvious exception is the SSRI “poop out” that can occur 6-12 months or more after beginning treatment. In addition, it’s important to make sure patients are taking their medications as prescribed, and that the generic formulations have not changed.
But as rates of mental illness increase, some of it spurred on by difficult times,
This is not to devalue our medications, but to help the patient see symptoms as having multiple factors and give them some means to intervene, in addition to medications. At the beginning of therapy, it is important to “prescribe” lifestyle changes that will facilitate the best possible outcomes.
Nonpharmaceutical prescriptions
Early in my career, people with alcohol use problems were told they needed to be substance free before they were candidates for antidepressants. While we no longer do that, it is still important to emphasize abstinence from addictive substances, and to recommend specific treatment when necessary.
Patients are often reluctant to see their use of alcohol, marijuana (it’s medical! It’s part of wellness!), or their pain medications as part of the problem, and this can be difficult. There have been times, after multiple medications have failed to help their symptoms, when I have said, “If you don’t get treatment for this problem, I am not going to be able to help you feel better” and that has been motivating for the patient.
There are other “prescriptions” to write. Regular sleep is essential for people with mood disorders, and this can be difficult for many patients, especially those who do shift work, or who have regular disruptions to their sleep from noise, pets, and children. Exercise is wonderful for the cardiovascular system, calms anxiety, and maintains strength, endurance, mobility, and quality of life as people age. But it can be a hard sell to people in a mental health crisis.
Nature is healing, and sunshine helps with maintaining circadian rhythms. For those who don’t exercise, I often “prescribe” 20 to 30 minutes a day of walking, preferably outside, during daylight hours, in a park or natural setting. For people with anxiety, it is important to check their caffeine consumption and to suggest ways to moderate it – moving to decaffeinated beverages or titrating down by mixing decaf with caffeinated.
Meditation is something that many people find helpful. For anxious people, it can be very difficult, and I will prescribe a specific instructional video course that I like on the well-being app InsightTimer – Sarah Blondin’s Learn How to Meditate in Seven Days. The sessions are approximately 10 minutes long, and that seems like the right amount of time for a beginner.
When people are very ill and don’t want to go into the hospital, I talk with them about things that happen in the hospital that are helpful, things they can try to mimic at home. In the hospital, patients don’t go to work, they don’t spend hours a day on the computer, and they are given a pass from dealing with the routine stresses of daily life.
I ask them to take time off work, to avoid as much stress as possible, to spend time with loved ones who give them comfort, and to avoid the people who leave them feeling drained or distressed. I ask them to engage in activities they find healing, to eat well, exercise, and avoid social media. In the hospital, I emphasize, they wake patients up in the morning, ask them to get out of bed and engage in therapeutic activities. They are fed and kept from intoxicants.
When it comes to nutrition, we know so little about how food affects mental health. I feel like it can’t hurt to ask people to avoid fast foods, soft drinks, and processed foods, and so I do.
And what about compliance? Of course, not everyone complies; not everyone is interested in making changes and these can be hard changes. I’ve recently started to recommend the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. Sometimes a bit of motivational interviewing can also be helpful in getting people to look at slowly moving toward making changes.
In prescribing lifestyle changes, it is important to offer most of these changes as suggestions, not as things we insist on, or that will leave the patient feeling ashamed if he doesn’t follow through. They should be discussed early in treatment so that patients don’t feel blamed for their illness or relapses. As with all the things we prescribe, some of these behavior changes help some of the people some of the time. Suggesting them, however, makes the strong statement that treating psychiatric disorders can be about more than passively swallowing a pill.
Dr. Miller is a coauthor of “Committed: The Battle Over Involuntary Psychiatric Care” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). She has a private practice and is an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She disclosed no relevant conflicts of interest.