Psychiatry’s Mismatch with Primary Care

Ian Furst: Person massaging their hand due to pain

Source: CC-BY-SA-4.0; Self-published work

As you know from a recent post and an earlier post, medical clinicians experience difficulties identifying mental disorders. This should not surprise. Medicine has not trained them to diagnose or treat mental illnesses. Nevertheless, many have tried valiantly to learn about mental health problems on their own. When clinicians turn for help to psychiatry, the textbooks may frustrate them because they still cannot identify mental disorders in their practices. Let’s examine why, because the vast majority of mental health problems are in primary care.

The psychiatry approach centers on psychological symptoms suggesting a mental illness — for example, feeling depressed and hopeless in depression or feeling unduly worried and afraid in generalized anxiety disorder. Great benefit has resulted in the mental health community as a result. But medical settings differ.¹

Many primary care patients with a mental illness do not offer psychological symptoms; instead, they present long-term physical symptoms. Trained in diagnosing chronic diseases, the clinician pursues these clues in the hopes of making a diagnosis. Sometimes they find a disease, but just as often they do not, the latter patients designated as having medically unexplained symptoms with such diagnoses as chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, or fibromyalgia.

How important are physical symptoms in mental health care? The greater the number, severity, and duration of the symptoms, the more likely that patients have an associated mental illness, approaching a 100% likelihood when physical problems significantly disable the patient; it makes no difference whether the doctor can identify a disease or not.^2-4 The disability itself leads to depression and anxiety.^1,5 These patients incur tremendous losses in their everyday lives — for example, no longer able to work, play golf, have sex, or attend church. And those with chronic pain often resort to using legal or illegal substances, drugs which produce depression and anxiety to exacerbate the problem.

Frigole: Suffering Little Dog

Source: CC-BY-SA-4.0; Self-published work

How do different expectations play out in identifying a mental health problem? Psychiatry seems to expect that the depressed patient might say something like, “I’m feeling down, out of hope, and that life’s not worth it.” While that occasionally occurs in medical settings, more often than not primary care physicians can expect patients to say, “The pain’s so bad, I can’t even play with my kids, much less work. When do I get better? Can you refill my Vicodin.”

Why don’t primary care patients just come out and mention their psychological symptoms in addition to their disabling physical symptoms? There are many possibilities.¹ First is stigma, or the fear of acknowledging a mental problem. Second, patients often believe their clinician lacks interest. Indeed, this gains credence when a doctor focuses on tests and consultations for the physical problem—and fails to ask about possible mental symptoms. Third, patients simply aren’t accustomed to discussing such personal complaints. Finally, they may not themselves be completely aware of feeling depressed or anxious, and they may deny substance use problems. Aggravating an already difficult circumstance, even when patients acknowledge a psychological symptom, many diminish it or dismiss it with statements like, “Well, wouldn’t you feel depressed with this much pain?” This implies that anyone should expect depression in their situation. That indeed is true, but the implication that it’s of no significance is not.

Unhappily, most psychiatry textbooks ignore the physical mode of presentation in their discussions of common mental disorders. If they do address physical symptoms, they typically cordon the discussion off in a section at the end of the book on somatization. This only worsens the hopeful clinician’s plight when he or she reads about the confusing, unvalidated, and ever-changing criteria for various somatization syndromes.

So, in summary, how does the medical doctor identify patients with mental illnesses? First, understand that chronic physical symptoms accompanied by disability foretell an associated mental illness. Consider impairment in function from any chronic physical symptoms to represent “red flag” warnings that these patients also may have a mental illness—a previously hidden diagnosis.⁵ Then, specifically ask about the psychological symptoms of the common primary care mental disorders.^1-2 Once the clinician identifies psychological symptoms, standard textbooks, including our recent one for primary care,¹ present the details for making a diagnosis of the underlying mental illness and describe how to treat it. Importantly, the clinicians will find treatment of the mental illness highly effective.¹