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Brodalumab suicide risk similar to other biologics, postmarket study finds
.
The Food and Drug Administration approved brodalumab (Siliq) in 2017 for treatment of moderate to severe plaque psoriasis with a boxed warning for suicidal ideation and behavior and an associated Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) program indicating an increased risk of suicidality.
Half a decade later, “the available worldwide data do not support the notion that brodalumab has a unique risk of increased suicides,” senior investigator John Koo, MD, and coinvestigators at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in a preproof article in JAAD International, noting that postmarketing data are “often considered a better reflection of real-world outcomes than clinical trials.”
The researchers extracted data through the end of 2021 on the number of completed suicides for brodalumab and ten other biologics approved for psoriasis from the FDA’s Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS), an international publicly available database. The researchers included suicide data on the biologics for all indications.
The authors contacted pharmaceutical companies to determine the total number of patients prescribed each drug, securing mostly “best estimates” data on 5 of the 11 biologics available for psoriasis. The researchers then calculated the number of completed suicides per total number of prescribed patients.
For brodalumab, across 20,871 total prescriptions, there was only one verifiable suicide. It occurred in a Japanese man with terminal cancer and no nearby relatives 36 days after his first dose. The suicide rate for brodalumab was similar to that of ixekizumab, secukinumab, infliximab, and adalimumab.
“Brodalumab is a very efficacious agent and may have the fastest onset of action, yet its usage is minimal compared to the other agents because of this ‘black box’ warning ... despite the fact that it’s the least expensive of any biologic,” Dr. Koo, professor of dermatology and director of the Psoriasis and Skin Treatment Center, University of California, San Francisco, said in an interview.
Dr. Koo, who is board-certified in both dermatology and psychiatry, said he believes the boxed warning was never warranted. All three of the verified completed suicides that occurred during clinical trials of brodalumab for psoriasis were in people who had underlying psychiatric disorders or significant stressors, such as going to jail in one case, and depression and significant isolation in another, he said.
(An analysis of psychiatric adverse events during the psoriasis clinical trials, involving more than 4,000 patients, was published online Oct. 4, 2017, in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
George Han, MD, PhD, associate professor and director of research and teledermatology at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, New Hyde Park, N.Y., who was not involved in the research, said the new data is reassuring.
“We sometimes put it into context [in thinking and counseling about risk] that in the trials for brodalumab, the number of suicide attempts [versus completed suicides] was not an outlier,” he said. “But it’s hard to know what to make of that, so this piece of knowledge that the postmarketing data show there’s no safety signal should give people a lot of reassurance.”
Dr. Han said he has used the medication, a fully human anti-interleukin 17 receptor A monoclonal antibody, in many patients who “have not done so well on other biologics and it’s been a lifesaver ... a couple who have switched over have maintained the longest level of clearance they’ve had with anything. It’s quite striking.”
The efficacy stems at least partly from its mechanism of blocking all cytokines in the IL-17 family – including those involved in the “feedback loops that perpetuate psoriasis” – rather than just one as other biologics do, Dr. Han said.
Usage of the drug has been hindered by the black box warning and REMS program, not only because of the extra steps required and hesitation potentially evoked, but because samples are not available, and because the “formulary access is not what it could have been otherwise,” he noted.
The Siliq REMS patient enrollment form requires patients to pledge awareness of the fact that suicidal thoughts and behaviors have occurred in treated patients and that they should seek medical attention if they experience suicidal thoughts or new or worsening depression, anxiety, or other mood changes. Prescribers must be certified with the program and must pledge on each enrollment form that they have counseled their patients.
The box warning states that there is no established causal association between treatment with brodalumab and increased risk for suicidal ideation and behaviors (SIB).
Individuals with psoriasis are an “already vulnerable population” who have been shown in reviews and meta-analyses to have a higher prevalence of depression and a higher risk of SIB than those without the disease, Dr. Koo and colleagues wrote in a narrative review published in Cutis .
Regardless of therapy, they wrote in the review, dermatologists should assess for any history of depression and SIB, and evaluate for signs and symptoms of current depression and SIB, referring patients as necessary to primary care or mental health care.
In the psoriasis trials, brodalumab treatment appeared to improve symptoms of depression and anxiety – a finding consistent with the effects reported for other biologic therapies, they wrote.
The first author on the newly published preproof is Samuel Yeroushalmi, BS, a fourth-year medical student at George Washington University, Washington.
Siliq is marketed by Valeant Pharmaceuticals.
Dr. Koo disclosed that he is an adviser/consultant/speaker for numerous pharmaceutical companies, but not those that were involved in the development of brodalumab. Dr. Han said he has relationships with numerous companies, including those that have developed brodalumab and other biologic agents used for psoriasis. The authors declared funding sources as none.
.
The Food and Drug Administration approved brodalumab (Siliq) in 2017 for treatment of moderate to severe plaque psoriasis with a boxed warning for suicidal ideation and behavior and an associated Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) program indicating an increased risk of suicidality.
Half a decade later, “the available worldwide data do not support the notion that brodalumab has a unique risk of increased suicides,” senior investigator John Koo, MD, and coinvestigators at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in a preproof article in JAAD International, noting that postmarketing data are “often considered a better reflection of real-world outcomes than clinical trials.”
The researchers extracted data through the end of 2021 on the number of completed suicides for brodalumab and ten other biologics approved for psoriasis from the FDA’s Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS), an international publicly available database. The researchers included suicide data on the biologics for all indications.
The authors contacted pharmaceutical companies to determine the total number of patients prescribed each drug, securing mostly “best estimates” data on 5 of the 11 biologics available for psoriasis. The researchers then calculated the number of completed suicides per total number of prescribed patients.
For brodalumab, across 20,871 total prescriptions, there was only one verifiable suicide. It occurred in a Japanese man with terminal cancer and no nearby relatives 36 days after his first dose. The suicide rate for brodalumab was similar to that of ixekizumab, secukinumab, infliximab, and adalimumab.
“Brodalumab is a very efficacious agent and may have the fastest onset of action, yet its usage is minimal compared to the other agents because of this ‘black box’ warning ... despite the fact that it’s the least expensive of any biologic,” Dr. Koo, professor of dermatology and director of the Psoriasis and Skin Treatment Center, University of California, San Francisco, said in an interview.
Dr. Koo, who is board-certified in both dermatology and psychiatry, said he believes the boxed warning was never warranted. All three of the verified completed suicides that occurred during clinical trials of brodalumab for psoriasis were in people who had underlying psychiatric disorders or significant stressors, such as going to jail in one case, and depression and significant isolation in another, he said.
(An analysis of psychiatric adverse events during the psoriasis clinical trials, involving more than 4,000 patients, was published online Oct. 4, 2017, in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
George Han, MD, PhD, associate professor and director of research and teledermatology at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, New Hyde Park, N.Y., who was not involved in the research, said the new data is reassuring.
“We sometimes put it into context [in thinking and counseling about risk] that in the trials for brodalumab, the number of suicide attempts [versus completed suicides] was not an outlier,” he said. “But it’s hard to know what to make of that, so this piece of knowledge that the postmarketing data show there’s no safety signal should give people a lot of reassurance.”
Dr. Han said he has used the medication, a fully human anti-interleukin 17 receptor A monoclonal antibody, in many patients who “have not done so well on other biologics and it’s been a lifesaver ... a couple who have switched over have maintained the longest level of clearance they’ve had with anything. It’s quite striking.”
The efficacy stems at least partly from its mechanism of blocking all cytokines in the IL-17 family – including those involved in the “feedback loops that perpetuate psoriasis” – rather than just one as other biologics do, Dr. Han said.
Usage of the drug has been hindered by the black box warning and REMS program, not only because of the extra steps required and hesitation potentially evoked, but because samples are not available, and because the “formulary access is not what it could have been otherwise,” he noted.
The Siliq REMS patient enrollment form requires patients to pledge awareness of the fact that suicidal thoughts and behaviors have occurred in treated patients and that they should seek medical attention if they experience suicidal thoughts or new or worsening depression, anxiety, or other mood changes. Prescribers must be certified with the program and must pledge on each enrollment form that they have counseled their patients.
The box warning states that there is no established causal association between treatment with brodalumab and increased risk for suicidal ideation and behaviors (SIB).
Individuals with psoriasis are an “already vulnerable population” who have been shown in reviews and meta-analyses to have a higher prevalence of depression and a higher risk of SIB than those without the disease, Dr. Koo and colleagues wrote in a narrative review published in Cutis .
Regardless of therapy, they wrote in the review, dermatologists should assess for any history of depression and SIB, and evaluate for signs and symptoms of current depression and SIB, referring patients as necessary to primary care or mental health care.
In the psoriasis trials, brodalumab treatment appeared to improve symptoms of depression and anxiety – a finding consistent with the effects reported for other biologic therapies, they wrote.
The first author on the newly published preproof is Samuel Yeroushalmi, BS, a fourth-year medical student at George Washington University, Washington.
Siliq is marketed by Valeant Pharmaceuticals.
Dr. Koo disclosed that he is an adviser/consultant/speaker for numerous pharmaceutical companies, but not those that were involved in the development of brodalumab. Dr. Han said he has relationships with numerous companies, including those that have developed brodalumab and other biologic agents used for psoriasis. The authors declared funding sources as none.
.
The Food and Drug Administration approved brodalumab (Siliq) in 2017 for treatment of moderate to severe plaque psoriasis with a boxed warning for suicidal ideation and behavior and an associated Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) program indicating an increased risk of suicidality.
Half a decade later, “the available worldwide data do not support the notion that brodalumab has a unique risk of increased suicides,” senior investigator John Koo, MD, and coinvestigators at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in a preproof article in JAAD International, noting that postmarketing data are “often considered a better reflection of real-world outcomes than clinical trials.”
The researchers extracted data through the end of 2021 on the number of completed suicides for brodalumab and ten other biologics approved for psoriasis from the FDA’s Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS), an international publicly available database. The researchers included suicide data on the biologics for all indications.
The authors contacted pharmaceutical companies to determine the total number of patients prescribed each drug, securing mostly “best estimates” data on 5 of the 11 biologics available for psoriasis. The researchers then calculated the number of completed suicides per total number of prescribed patients.
For brodalumab, across 20,871 total prescriptions, there was only one verifiable suicide. It occurred in a Japanese man with terminal cancer and no nearby relatives 36 days after his first dose. The suicide rate for brodalumab was similar to that of ixekizumab, secukinumab, infliximab, and adalimumab.
“Brodalumab is a very efficacious agent and may have the fastest onset of action, yet its usage is minimal compared to the other agents because of this ‘black box’ warning ... despite the fact that it’s the least expensive of any biologic,” Dr. Koo, professor of dermatology and director of the Psoriasis and Skin Treatment Center, University of California, San Francisco, said in an interview.
Dr. Koo, who is board-certified in both dermatology and psychiatry, said he believes the boxed warning was never warranted. All three of the verified completed suicides that occurred during clinical trials of brodalumab for psoriasis were in people who had underlying psychiatric disorders or significant stressors, such as going to jail in one case, and depression and significant isolation in another, he said.
(An analysis of psychiatric adverse events during the psoriasis clinical trials, involving more than 4,000 patients, was published online Oct. 4, 2017, in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
George Han, MD, PhD, associate professor and director of research and teledermatology at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, New Hyde Park, N.Y., who was not involved in the research, said the new data is reassuring.
“We sometimes put it into context [in thinking and counseling about risk] that in the trials for brodalumab, the number of suicide attempts [versus completed suicides] was not an outlier,” he said. “But it’s hard to know what to make of that, so this piece of knowledge that the postmarketing data show there’s no safety signal should give people a lot of reassurance.”
Dr. Han said he has used the medication, a fully human anti-interleukin 17 receptor A monoclonal antibody, in many patients who “have not done so well on other biologics and it’s been a lifesaver ... a couple who have switched over have maintained the longest level of clearance they’ve had with anything. It’s quite striking.”
The efficacy stems at least partly from its mechanism of blocking all cytokines in the IL-17 family – including those involved in the “feedback loops that perpetuate psoriasis” – rather than just one as other biologics do, Dr. Han said.
Usage of the drug has been hindered by the black box warning and REMS program, not only because of the extra steps required and hesitation potentially evoked, but because samples are not available, and because the “formulary access is not what it could have been otherwise,” he noted.
The Siliq REMS patient enrollment form requires patients to pledge awareness of the fact that suicidal thoughts and behaviors have occurred in treated patients and that they should seek medical attention if they experience suicidal thoughts or new or worsening depression, anxiety, or other mood changes. Prescribers must be certified with the program and must pledge on each enrollment form that they have counseled their patients.
The box warning states that there is no established causal association between treatment with brodalumab and increased risk for suicidal ideation and behaviors (SIB).
Individuals with psoriasis are an “already vulnerable population” who have been shown in reviews and meta-analyses to have a higher prevalence of depression and a higher risk of SIB than those without the disease, Dr. Koo and colleagues wrote in a narrative review published in Cutis .
Regardless of therapy, they wrote in the review, dermatologists should assess for any history of depression and SIB, and evaluate for signs and symptoms of current depression and SIB, referring patients as necessary to primary care or mental health care.
In the psoriasis trials, brodalumab treatment appeared to improve symptoms of depression and anxiety – a finding consistent with the effects reported for other biologic therapies, they wrote.
The first author on the newly published preproof is Samuel Yeroushalmi, BS, a fourth-year medical student at George Washington University, Washington.
Siliq is marketed by Valeant Pharmaceuticals.
Dr. Koo disclosed that he is an adviser/consultant/speaker for numerous pharmaceutical companies, but not those that were involved in the development of brodalumab. Dr. Han said he has relationships with numerous companies, including those that have developed brodalumab and other biologic agents used for psoriasis. The authors declared funding sources as none.
Physicians can’t be bystanders in ‘silent scourge’ of medical bullying
Maya Iyer, MD, MEd, experienced bullying as a faculty member, and she sensed that she wasn’t alone. “The best ideas for research often come from individual experiences, in both personal and the professional academic medicine setting,” she said in an interview.
“And I was correct. I was not the only one who experienced bullying. In fact, the most severe bullying experiences among ... women physician leaders occurred when they were in leadership positions,” said Dr. Iyer, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
She is a coauthor of a study that was published in JAMA Network Open in which investigators surveyed the existence of antibullying policies for faculty at almost 100 U.S. medical schools.
The researchers defined bullying as “a severe form of mistreatment [that] occurs in the medical setting when a power differential allows offenders to consciously target individuals through persistent negative actions to impede the education or career of the target.”
The study included 91 medical schools, of which 4 schools had antibullying policies that included the reporting of procedures. Of the 87 medical schools without antibullying policies, 60 had antiharrassment policies; of those schools, 10 of the schools’ websites cited bullying and antiharassment policies. Five schools required a login to access policies, and one school’s website had a broken webpage link, per the study.
“We need to bring the silent scourge of bullying to the forefront because bullying is causing a brain drain on the medical profession,” said Dr. Iyer. “Bullying has numerous downstream negative effects, including depression, anxiety, burnout stress, decreased patient care satisfaction, increased medical errors, and job attrition.”
She added: “Through bullying, we are losing voices in medicine just at that point in time where we are trying to diversify the workforce to improve representation of all physicians.”
Dr. Iyer’s team sampled the top 25 schools for research and the top 25 schools for primary care. They also took a random sampling from 25 schools for research and a random sampling from top 25 schools for primary care. They assessed antibullying policies, antiharassment policies that mentioned bullying, antiharrassment policies that did not mention bullying, and the absence of policies addressing these issues.
Policy comprehensiveness was another focus for the researchers. They evaluated whether the relevant policies included faculty members and articulated the institution’s commitment to providing a safe and healthy workplace. Other factors included defining bullying and the roles and responsibilities of employees and procedures for reporting bullying.
Physicians can’t be bystanders to bullying
This means transitioning from being a bystander to an upstander.”
She doesn’t let medical schools off the hook, however. Instead, she advocated having institutions “provide safe spaces and opportunities for near-peer mentoring so that targets of bullying can share stories.”
Regarding who is responsible for addressing bullying, Dr. Iyer is emphatic. “I do want to be clear that the onus of disrupting does not fall on the targets. Rather, we need to fix the systems in which such behavior is tolerated.”
Her advice to leaders in academic medicine is to create comprehensive, zero-retaliation bullying policies that include detailed reporting procedures. Dr. Iyer advised leaders to partner with colleagues in human resources, offices of equity, and ombudspersons to develop, implement, and enforce these policies.
The study authors reported no conflicts of interest.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
Maya Iyer, MD, MEd, experienced bullying as a faculty member, and she sensed that she wasn’t alone. “The best ideas for research often come from individual experiences, in both personal and the professional academic medicine setting,” she said in an interview.
“And I was correct. I was not the only one who experienced bullying. In fact, the most severe bullying experiences among ... women physician leaders occurred when they were in leadership positions,” said Dr. Iyer, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
She is a coauthor of a study that was published in JAMA Network Open in which investigators surveyed the existence of antibullying policies for faculty at almost 100 U.S. medical schools.
The researchers defined bullying as “a severe form of mistreatment [that] occurs in the medical setting when a power differential allows offenders to consciously target individuals through persistent negative actions to impede the education or career of the target.”
The study included 91 medical schools, of which 4 schools had antibullying policies that included the reporting of procedures. Of the 87 medical schools without antibullying policies, 60 had antiharrassment policies; of those schools, 10 of the schools’ websites cited bullying and antiharassment policies. Five schools required a login to access policies, and one school’s website had a broken webpage link, per the study.
“We need to bring the silent scourge of bullying to the forefront because bullying is causing a brain drain on the medical profession,” said Dr. Iyer. “Bullying has numerous downstream negative effects, including depression, anxiety, burnout stress, decreased patient care satisfaction, increased medical errors, and job attrition.”
She added: “Through bullying, we are losing voices in medicine just at that point in time where we are trying to diversify the workforce to improve representation of all physicians.”
Dr. Iyer’s team sampled the top 25 schools for research and the top 25 schools for primary care. They also took a random sampling from 25 schools for research and a random sampling from top 25 schools for primary care. They assessed antibullying policies, antiharassment policies that mentioned bullying, antiharrassment policies that did not mention bullying, and the absence of policies addressing these issues.
Policy comprehensiveness was another focus for the researchers. They evaluated whether the relevant policies included faculty members and articulated the institution’s commitment to providing a safe and healthy workplace. Other factors included defining bullying and the roles and responsibilities of employees and procedures for reporting bullying.
Physicians can’t be bystanders to bullying
This means transitioning from being a bystander to an upstander.”
She doesn’t let medical schools off the hook, however. Instead, she advocated having institutions “provide safe spaces and opportunities for near-peer mentoring so that targets of bullying can share stories.”
Regarding who is responsible for addressing bullying, Dr. Iyer is emphatic. “I do want to be clear that the onus of disrupting does not fall on the targets. Rather, we need to fix the systems in which such behavior is tolerated.”
Her advice to leaders in academic medicine is to create comprehensive, zero-retaliation bullying policies that include detailed reporting procedures. Dr. Iyer advised leaders to partner with colleagues in human resources, offices of equity, and ombudspersons to develop, implement, and enforce these policies.
The study authors reported no conflicts of interest.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
Maya Iyer, MD, MEd, experienced bullying as a faculty member, and she sensed that she wasn’t alone. “The best ideas for research often come from individual experiences, in both personal and the professional academic medicine setting,” she said in an interview.
“And I was correct. I was not the only one who experienced bullying. In fact, the most severe bullying experiences among ... women physician leaders occurred when they were in leadership positions,” said Dr. Iyer, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
She is a coauthor of a study that was published in JAMA Network Open in which investigators surveyed the existence of antibullying policies for faculty at almost 100 U.S. medical schools.
The researchers defined bullying as “a severe form of mistreatment [that] occurs in the medical setting when a power differential allows offenders to consciously target individuals through persistent negative actions to impede the education or career of the target.”
The study included 91 medical schools, of which 4 schools had antibullying policies that included the reporting of procedures. Of the 87 medical schools without antibullying policies, 60 had antiharrassment policies; of those schools, 10 of the schools’ websites cited bullying and antiharassment policies. Five schools required a login to access policies, and one school’s website had a broken webpage link, per the study.
“We need to bring the silent scourge of bullying to the forefront because bullying is causing a brain drain on the medical profession,” said Dr. Iyer. “Bullying has numerous downstream negative effects, including depression, anxiety, burnout stress, decreased patient care satisfaction, increased medical errors, and job attrition.”
She added: “Through bullying, we are losing voices in medicine just at that point in time where we are trying to diversify the workforce to improve representation of all physicians.”
Dr. Iyer’s team sampled the top 25 schools for research and the top 25 schools for primary care. They also took a random sampling from 25 schools for research and a random sampling from top 25 schools for primary care. They assessed antibullying policies, antiharassment policies that mentioned bullying, antiharrassment policies that did not mention bullying, and the absence of policies addressing these issues.
Policy comprehensiveness was another focus for the researchers. They evaluated whether the relevant policies included faculty members and articulated the institution’s commitment to providing a safe and healthy workplace. Other factors included defining bullying and the roles and responsibilities of employees and procedures for reporting bullying.
Physicians can’t be bystanders to bullying
This means transitioning from being a bystander to an upstander.”
She doesn’t let medical schools off the hook, however. Instead, she advocated having institutions “provide safe spaces and opportunities for near-peer mentoring so that targets of bullying can share stories.”
Regarding who is responsible for addressing bullying, Dr. Iyer is emphatic. “I do want to be clear that the onus of disrupting does not fall on the targets. Rather, we need to fix the systems in which such behavior is tolerated.”
Her advice to leaders in academic medicine is to create comprehensive, zero-retaliation bullying policies that include detailed reporting procedures. Dr. Iyer advised leaders to partner with colleagues in human resources, offices of equity, and ombudspersons to develop, implement, and enforce these policies.
The study authors reported no conflicts of interest.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
FROM JAMA NETWORK OPEN
EHR: A progress report
I wrote my first column on electronic health records in the mid-1990s. At the time, it seemed like an idea whose time had come. After all, in an era when just about every essential process in medicine had already been computerized, we physicians continued to process clinical data – our key asset – with pen and paper. Most of us were reluctant to make the switch, and for good reason:
Then, the government stepped in. Shortly after his inauguration in 2000, President George W. Bush outlined a plan to ensure that most Americans had electronic health records within 10 years. “By computerizing health records,” the president said, “we can avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs, and improve care.” The goal was to eliminate missing charts, duplication of lab testing, ineffective documentation, and inordinate amounts of time spent on paperwork, not to mention illegible handwriting, poor coordination of care between physicians, and many other problems. Studies were quoted, suggesting that EHR shortened inpatient stays, decreased risk of adverse drug interactions, improved the consistency and content of records, and improved continuity of care and follow-up.
The EHR Incentive Program (later renamed the Promoting Interoperability Program) was introduced to encourage physicians and hospitals “to adopt, implement, upgrade, and demonstrate meaningful use of certified electronic health record technology.”
Nearly a quarter-century later, implementation is well behind schedule. According to a 2019 federal study, while nearly all hospitals (96%) have adopted a certified EHR, only 72% of office-based physicians have done so.
There are multiple reasons for this. For one thing, EHR is still by and large slower than pen and paper, because direct data entry is still primarily done by keyboard. Voice recognition, hand-held and wireless devices have been developed, but most work only on specialized tasks. Even the best systems take more clinician time per encounter than the manual processes they replace.
Physicians have been slow to warm to a system that slows them down and forces them to change the way they think and work. In addition, paper systems never crash; the prospect of a server malfunction or Internet failure bringing an entire clinic to a grinding halt is not particularly inviting.
The special needs of dermatology – high patient volumes, multiple diagnoses and prescriptions per patient, the wide variety of procedures we perform, and digital image storage – present further hurdles.
Nevertheless, the march toward electronic record keeping continues, and I continue to receive many questions about choosing a good EHR system. As always, I cannot recommend any specific products since every office has unique needs and requirements.
The key phrase to keep in mind is caveat emptor. Several regulatory bodies exist to test vendor claims and certify system behaviors, but different agencies use different criteria that may or may not be relevant to your requirements. Vaporware is still as common as real software; beware the “feature in the next release” that might never appear, particularly if you need it right now.
Avoid the temptation to buy a flashy new system and then try to adapt it to your office; figure out your needs first, then find a system that meets them.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way around doing the work of comparing one system with another. The most important information a vendor can give you is the names and addresses of two or more offices where you can go watch their system in action. Site visits are time-consuming, but they are only way to pick the best EHR the first time around.
Don’t be the first office using a new system. Let the vendor work out the bugs somewhere else.
Above all, if you have disorganized paper records, don’t count on EHR to automatically solve your problems. Well-designed paper systems usually lend themselves to effective automation, but automating a poorly designed system just increases the chaos. If your paper system is in disarray, solve that problem before considering EHR.
With all of its problems and hurdles, EHRs will inevitably be a part of most of our lives. And for those who take the time to do it right, it will ultimately be an improvement.
Think of information technologies as power tools: They can help you to do things better, but they can also amplify your errors. So choose carefully.
Dr. Eastern practices dermatology and dermatologic surgery in Belleville, N.J. He is the author of numerous articles and textbook chapters, and is a longtime monthly columnist for Dermatology News. Write to him at [email protected].
I wrote my first column on electronic health records in the mid-1990s. At the time, it seemed like an idea whose time had come. After all, in an era when just about every essential process in medicine had already been computerized, we physicians continued to process clinical data – our key asset – with pen and paper. Most of us were reluctant to make the switch, and for good reason:
Then, the government stepped in. Shortly after his inauguration in 2000, President George W. Bush outlined a plan to ensure that most Americans had electronic health records within 10 years. “By computerizing health records,” the president said, “we can avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs, and improve care.” The goal was to eliminate missing charts, duplication of lab testing, ineffective documentation, and inordinate amounts of time spent on paperwork, not to mention illegible handwriting, poor coordination of care between physicians, and many other problems. Studies were quoted, suggesting that EHR shortened inpatient stays, decreased risk of adverse drug interactions, improved the consistency and content of records, and improved continuity of care and follow-up.
The EHR Incentive Program (later renamed the Promoting Interoperability Program) was introduced to encourage physicians and hospitals “to adopt, implement, upgrade, and demonstrate meaningful use of certified electronic health record technology.”
Nearly a quarter-century later, implementation is well behind schedule. According to a 2019 federal study, while nearly all hospitals (96%) have adopted a certified EHR, only 72% of office-based physicians have done so.
There are multiple reasons for this. For one thing, EHR is still by and large slower than pen and paper, because direct data entry is still primarily done by keyboard. Voice recognition, hand-held and wireless devices have been developed, but most work only on specialized tasks. Even the best systems take more clinician time per encounter than the manual processes they replace.
Physicians have been slow to warm to a system that slows them down and forces them to change the way they think and work. In addition, paper systems never crash; the prospect of a server malfunction or Internet failure bringing an entire clinic to a grinding halt is not particularly inviting.
The special needs of dermatology – high patient volumes, multiple diagnoses and prescriptions per patient, the wide variety of procedures we perform, and digital image storage – present further hurdles.
Nevertheless, the march toward electronic record keeping continues, and I continue to receive many questions about choosing a good EHR system. As always, I cannot recommend any specific products since every office has unique needs and requirements.
The key phrase to keep in mind is caveat emptor. Several regulatory bodies exist to test vendor claims and certify system behaviors, but different agencies use different criteria that may or may not be relevant to your requirements. Vaporware is still as common as real software; beware the “feature in the next release” that might never appear, particularly if you need it right now.
Avoid the temptation to buy a flashy new system and then try to adapt it to your office; figure out your needs first, then find a system that meets them.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way around doing the work of comparing one system with another. The most important information a vendor can give you is the names and addresses of two or more offices where you can go watch their system in action. Site visits are time-consuming, but they are only way to pick the best EHR the first time around.
Don’t be the first office using a new system. Let the vendor work out the bugs somewhere else.
Above all, if you have disorganized paper records, don’t count on EHR to automatically solve your problems. Well-designed paper systems usually lend themselves to effective automation, but automating a poorly designed system just increases the chaos. If your paper system is in disarray, solve that problem before considering EHR.
With all of its problems and hurdles, EHRs will inevitably be a part of most of our lives. And for those who take the time to do it right, it will ultimately be an improvement.
Think of information technologies as power tools: They can help you to do things better, but they can also amplify your errors. So choose carefully.
Dr. Eastern practices dermatology and dermatologic surgery in Belleville, N.J. He is the author of numerous articles and textbook chapters, and is a longtime monthly columnist for Dermatology News. Write to him at [email protected].
I wrote my first column on electronic health records in the mid-1990s. At the time, it seemed like an idea whose time had come. After all, in an era when just about every essential process in medicine had already been computerized, we physicians continued to process clinical data – our key asset – with pen and paper. Most of us were reluctant to make the switch, and for good reason:
Then, the government stepped in. Shortly after his inauguration in 2000, President George W. Bush outlined a plan to ensure that most Americans had electronic health records within 10 years. “By computerizing health records,” the president said, “we can avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs, and improve care.” The goal was to eliminate missing charts, duplication of lab testing, ineffective documentation, and inordinate amounts of time spent on paperwork, not to mention illegible handwriting, poor coordination of care between physicians, and many other problems. Studies were quoted, suggesting that EHR shortened inpatient stays, decreased risk of adverse drug interactions, improved the consistency and content of records, and improved continuity of care and follow-up.
The EHR Incentive Program (later renamed the Promoting Interoperability Program) was introduced to encourage physicians and hospitals “to adopt, implement, upgrade, and demonstrate meaningful use of certified electronic health record technology.”
Nearly a quarter-century later, implementation is well behind schedule. According to a 2019 federal study, while nearly all hospitals (96%) have adopted a certified EHR, only 72% of office-based physicians have done so.
There are multiple reasons for this. For one thing, EHR is still by and large slower than pen and paper, because direct data entry is still primarily done by keyboard. Voice recognition, hand-held and wireless devices have been developed, but most work only on specialized tasks. Even the best systems take more clinician time per encounter than the manual processes they replace.
Physicians have been slow to warm to a system that slows them down and forces them to change the way they think and work. In addition, paper systems never crash; the prospect of a server malfunction or Internet failure bringing an entire clinic to a grinding halt is not particularly inviting.
The special needs of dermatology – high patient volumes, multiple diagnoses and prescriptions per patient, the wide variety of procedures we perform, and digital image storage – present further hurdles.
Nevertheless, the march toward electronic record keeping continues, and I continue to receive many questions about choosing a good EHR system. As always, I cannot recommend any specific products since every office has unique needs and requirements.
The key phrase to keep in mind is caveat emptor. Several regulatory bodies exist to test vendor claims and certify system behaviors, but different agencies use different criteria that may or may not be relevant to your requirements. Vaporware is still as common as real software; beware the “feature in the next release” that might never appear, particularly if you need it right now.
Avoid the temptation to buy a flashy new system and then try to adapt it to your office; figure out your needs first, then find a system that meets them.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way around doing the work of comparing one system with another. The most important information a vendor can give you is the names and addresses of two or more offices where you can go watch their system in action. Site visits are time-consuming, but they are only way to pick the best EHR the first time around.
Don’t be the first office using a new system. Let the vendor work out the bugs somewhere else.
Above all, if you have disorganized paper records, don’t count on EHR to automatically solve your problems. Well-designed paper systems usually lend themselves to effective automation, but automating a poorly designed system just increases the chaos. If your paper system is in disarray, solve that problem before considering EHR.
With all of its problems and hurdles, EHRs will inevitably be a part of most of our lives. And for those who take the time to do it right, it will ultimately be an improvement.
Think of information technologies as power tools: They can help you to do things better, but they can also amplify your errors. So choose carefully.
Dr. Eastern practices dermatology and dermatologic surgery in Belleville, N.J. He is the author of numerous articles and textbook chapters, and is a longtime monthly columnist for Dermatology News. Write to him at [email protected].
COVID-19 linked to increased Alzheimer’s risk
The study of more than 6 million people aged 65 years or older found a 50%-80% increased risk for AD in the year after COVID-19; the risk was especially high for women older than 85 years.
However, the investigators were quick to point out that the observational retrospective study offers no evidence that COVID-19 causes AD. There could be a viral etiology at play, or the connection could be related to inflammation in neural tissue from the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Or it could simply be that exposure to the health care system for COVID-19 increased the odds of detection of existing undiagnosed AD cases.
Whatever the case, these findings point to a potential spike in AD cases, which is a cause for concern, study investigator Pamela Davis, MD, PhD, a professor in the Center for Community Health Integration at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, said in an interview.
“COVID may be giving us a legacy of ongoing medical difficulties,” Dr. Davis said. “We were already concerned about having a very large care burden and cost burden from Alzheimer’s disease. If this is another burden that’s increased by COVID, this is something we’re really going to have to prepare for.”
The findings were published online in Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Increased risk
Earlier research points to a potential link between COVID-19 and increased risk for AD and Parkinson’s disease.
For the current study, researchers analyzed anonymous electronic health records of 6.2 million adults aged 65 years or older who received medical treatment between February 2020 and May 2021 and had no prior diagnosis of AD. The database includes information on almost 30% of the entire U.S. population.
Overall, there were 410,748 cases of COVID-19 during the study period.
The overall risk for new diagnosis of AD in the COVID-19 cohort was close to double that of those who did not have COVID-19 (0.68% vs. 0.35%, respectively).
After propensity-score matching, those who have had COVID-19 had a significantly higher risk for an AD diagnosis compared with those who were not infected (hazard ratio [HR], 1.69; 95% confidence interval [CI],1.53-1.72).
Risk for AD was elevated in all age groups, regardless of gender or ethnicity. Researchers did not collect data on COVID-19 severity, and the medical codes for long COVID were not published until after the study had ended.
Those with the highest risk were individuals older than 85 years (HR, 1.89; 95% CI, 1.73-2.07) and women (HR, 1.82; 95% CI, 1.69-1.97).
“We expected to see some impact, but I was surprised that it was as potent as it was,” Dr. Davis said.
Association, not causation
Heather Snyder, PhD, Alzheimer’s Association vice president of medical and scientific relations, who commented on the findings for this article, called the study interesting but emphasized caution in interpreting the results.
“Because this study only showed an association through medical records, we cannot know what the underlying mechanisms driving this association are without more research,” Dr. Snyder said. “If you have had COVID-19, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get dementia. But if you have had COVID-19 and are experiencing long-term symptoms including cognitive difficulties, talk to your doctor.”
Dr. Davis agreed, noting that this type of study offers information on association, but not causation. “I do think that this makes it imperative that we continue to follow the population for what’s going on in various neurodegenerative diseases,” Dr. Davis said.
The study was funded by the National Institute of Aging, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative of Cleveland, and the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Synder reports no relevant financial conflicts.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
The study of more than 6 million people aged 65 years or older found a 50%-80% increased risk for AD in the year after COVID-19; the risk was especially high for women older than 85 years.
However, the investigators were quick to point out that the observational retrospective study offers no evidence that COVID-19 causes AD. There could be a viral etiology at play, or the connection could be related to inflammation in neural tissue from the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Or it could simply be that exposure to the health care system for COVID-19 increased the odds of detection of existing undiagnosed AD cases.
Whatever the case, these findings point to a potential spike in AD cases, which is a cause for concern, study investigator Pamela Davis, MD, PhD, a professor in the Center for Community Health Integration at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, said in an interview.
“COVID may be giving us a legacy of ongoing medical difficulties,” Dr. Davis said. “We were already concerned about having a very large care burden and cost burden from Alzheimer’s disease. If this is another burden that’s increased by COVID, this is something we’re really going to have to prepare for.”
The findings were published online in Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Increased risk
Earlier research points to a potential link between COVID-19 and increased risk for AD and Parkinson’s disease.
For the current study, researchers analyzed anonymous electronic health records of 6.2 million adults aged 65 years or older who received medical treatment between February 2020 and May 2021 and had no prior diagnosis of AD. The database includes information on almost 30% of the entire U.S. population.
Overall, there were 410,748 cases of COVID-19 during the study period.
The overall risk for new diagnosis of AD in the COVID-19 cohort was close to double that of those who did not have COVID-19 (0.68% vs. 0.35%, respectively).
After propensity-score matching, those who have had COVID-19 had a significantly higher risk for an AD diagnosis compared with those who were not infected (hazard ratio [HR], 1.69; 95% confidence interval [CI],1.53-1.72).
Risk for AD was elevated in all age groups, regardless of gender or ethnicity. Researchers did not collect data on COVID-19 severity, and the medical codes for long COVID were not published until after the study had ended.
Those with the highest risk were individuals older than 85 years (HR, 1.89; 95% CI, 1.73-2.07) and women (HR, 1.82; 95% CI, 1.69-1.97).
“We expected to see some impact, but I was surprised that it was as potent as it was,” Dr. Davis said.
Association, not causation
Heather Snyder, PhD, Alzheimer’s Association vice president of medical and scientific relations, who commented on the findings for this article, called the study interesting but emphasized caution in interpreting the results.
“Because this study only showed an association through medical records, we cannot know what the underlying mechanisms driving this association are without more research,” Dr. Snyder said. “If you have had COVID-19, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get dementia. But if you have had COVID-19 and are experiencing long-term symptoms including cognitive difficulties, talk to your doctor.”
Dr. Davis agreed, noting that this type of study offers information on association, but not causation. “I do think that this makes it imperative that we continue to follow the population for what’s going on in various neurodegenerative diseases,” Dr. Davis said.
The study was funded by the National Institute of Aging, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative of Cleveland, and the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Synder reports no relevant financial conflicts.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
The study of more than 6 million people aged 65 years or older found a 50%-80% increased risk for AD in the year after COVID-19; the risk was especially high for women older than 85 years.
However, the investigators were quick to point out that the observational retrospective study offers no evidence that COVID-19 causes AD. There could be a viral etiology at play, or the connection could be related to inflammation in neural tissue from the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Or it could simply be that exposure to the health care system for COVID-19 increased the odds of detection of existing undiagnosed AD cases.
Whatever the case, these findings point to a potential spike in AD cases, which is a cause for concern, study investigator Pamela Davis, MD, PhD, a professor in the Center for Community Health Integration at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, said in an interview.
“COVID may be giving us a legacy of ongoing medical difficulties,” Dr. Davis said. “We were already concerned about having a very large care burden and cost burden from Alzheimer’s disease. If this is another burden that’s increased by COVID, this is something we’re really going to have to prepare for.”
The findings were published online in Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Increased risk
Earlier research points to a potential link between COVID-19 and increased risk for AD and Parkinson’s disease.
For the current study, researchers analyzed anonymous electronic health records of 6.2 million adults aged 65 years or older who received medical treatment between February 2020 and May 2021 and had no prior diagnosis of AD. The database includes information on almost 30% of the entire U.S. population.
Overall, there were 410,748 cases of COVID-19 during the study period.
The overall risk for new diagnosis of AD in the COVID-19 cohort was close to double that of those who did not have COVID-19 (0.68% vs. 0.35%, respectively).
After propensity-score matching, those who have had COVID-19 had a significantly higher risk for an AD diagnosis compared with those who were not infected (hazard ratio [HR], 1.69; 95% confidence interval [CI],1.53-1.72).
Risk for AD was elevated in all age groups, regardless of gender or ethnicity. Researchers did not collect data on COVID-19 severity, and the medical codes for long COVID were not published until after the study had ended.
Those with the highest risk were individuals older than 85 years (HR, 1.89; 95% CI, 1.73-2.07) and women (HR, 1.82; 95% CI, 1.69-1.97).
“We expected to see some impact, but I was surprised that it was as potent as it was,” Dr. Davis said.
Association, not causation
Heather Snyder, PhD, Alzheimer’s Association vice president of medical and scientific relations, who commented on the findings for this article, called the study interesting but emphasized caution in interpreting the results.
“Because this study only showed an association through medical records, we cannot know what the underlying mechanisms driving this association are without more research,” Dr. Snyder said. “If you have had COVID-19, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get dementia. But if you have had COVID-19 and are experiencing long-term symptoms including cognitive difficulties, talk to your doctor.”
Dr. Davis agreed, noting that this type of study offers information on association, but not causation. “I do think that this makes it imperative that we continue to follow the population for what’s going on in various neurodegenerative diseases,” Dr. Davis said.
The study was funded by the National Institute of Aging, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative of Cleveland, and the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Synder reports no relevant financial conflicts.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE
Quiet quitting: Are physicians dying inside bit by bit? Or setting healthy boundaries?
In the past few months, “quiet quitting” has garnered increasing traction across social media platforms. My morning review of social media revealed thousands of posts ranging from “Why doing less at work could be good for you – and your employer” to “After ‘quiet quitting’ here comes ‘quiet firing.’ ”
But quiet quitting is neither quiet nor quitting.
Quiet quitting is a misnomer. In addition, quiet quitters are firmer with their boundaries, do not take on work above and beyond clearly stated expectations, do not respond after hours, and do not feel like they are “not doing their job” when they are not immediately available.
Individuals who “quiet quit” continue to meet the demands of their job but reject the hustle-culture mentality that you must always be available for more work and, most importantly, that your value as person and self-worth are defined and determined by your work. Quiet quitters believe that it is possible to have good boundaries and yet remain productive, engaged, and active within the workplace.
Earlier this month, NPR’s posted tutorial on how to set better boundaries at work garnered 491,000 views, reflecting employees’ difficulties in communicating their needs, thoughts, and availability to their employers. Quiet quitting refers to not only rejecting the idea of going above and beyond in the workplace but also feeling confident that there will not be negative ramifications for not consistently working beyond the expected requirements.
A focus on balance, life, loves, and family is rarely addressed or emphasized by traditional employers; employees have little skill in addressing boundaries and clarifying their value and availability. For decades, “needing” flexibility of any kind or valuing activities as much as your job were viewed as negative attributes, making those individuals less-desired employees.
Data support the quiet quitting trend. Gallup data reveal that employee engagement has fallen for 2 consecutive years in the U.S. workforce. Across the first quarter of 2022, Generation Z and younger Millennials report the lowest engagement across populations at 31%. More than half of this cohort, 54%, classified as “not engaged” in their workplace.
Why is quiet quitting gaining prominence now? COVID may play a role.
Many suggest that self-evaluation and establishing firmer boundaries is a logical response to emotional sequelae caused by COVID. Quiet quitting appears to have been fueled by the pandemic. Employees were forced into crisis mode by COVID; the lines between work, life, and home evaporated, allowing or forcing workers to evaluate their efficacy and satisfaction. With the structural impact of COVID reducing and a return to more standard work practices, it is expected that the job “rules” once held as truths come under evaluation and scrutiny.
Perhaps COVID has forced, and provided, another opportunity for us to closely examine our routines and habits and take stock of what really matters. Generations expectedly differ in their values and definitions of success. COVID has set prior established rules on fire, by forcing patterns and expectations that were neither expected nor wanted, within the context of a global health crisis. Within this backdrop, should we really believe our worth is determined by our job?
The truth is, we are still grieving what we lost during COVID and we have expectedly not assimilated to “the new normal.” Psychology has long recognized that losing structures and supports, routines and habits, causes symptoms of significant discomfort.
The idea that we would return to prior workplace expectations is naive. The idea we would “return to life as it was” is naive. It seems expected, then, that both employers and employees should evaluate their goals and communicate more openly about how each can be met.
It is incumbent upon the employers to set up clear guidelines regarding expectations, including rewards for performance and expectations for time, both within and outside of the work schedule. Employers must recognize symptoms of detachment in their employees and engage in the process of continuing clarifying roles and expectations while providing necessities for employees to succeed at their highest level. Employees, in turn, must self-examine their goals, communicate their needs, meet their responsibilities fully, and take on the challenge of determining their own definition of balance.
Maybe instead of quiet quitting, we should call it this new movement “self-awareness, growth, and evolution.” Hmmm, there’s an intriguing thought.
Dr. Calvery is professor of pediatrics at the University of Louisville (Ky.) She disclosed no relevant conflicts of interest.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
In the past few months, “quiet quitting” has garnered increasing traction across social media platforms. My morning review of social media revealed thousands of posts ranging from “Why doing less at work could be good for you – and your employer” to “After ‘quiet quitting’ here comes ‘quiet firing.’ ”
But quiet quitting is neither quiet nor quitting.
Quiet quitting is a misnomer. In addition, quiet quitters are firmer with their boundaries, do not take on work above and beyond clearly stated expectations, do not respond after hours, and do not feel like they are “not doing their job” when they are not immediately available.
Individuals who “quiet quit” continue to meet the demands of their job but reject the hustle-culture mentality that you must always be available for more work and, most importantly, that your value as person and self-worth are defined and determined by your work. Quiet quitters believe that it is possible to have good boundaries and yet remain productive, engaged, and active within the workplace.
Earlier this month, NPR’s posted tutorial on how to set better boundaries at work garnered 491,000 views, reflecting employees’ difficulties in communicating their needs, thoughts, and availability to their employers. Quiet quitting refers to not only rejecting the idea of going above and beyond in the workplace but also feeling confident that there will not be negative ramifications for not consistently working beyond the expected requirements.
A focus on balance, life, loves, and family is rarely addressed or emphasized by traditional employers; employees have little skill in addressing boundaries and clarifying their value and availability. For decades, “needing” flexibility of any kind or valuing activities as much as your job were viewed as negative attributes, making those individuals less-desired employees.
Data support the quiet quitting trend. Gallup data reveal that employee engagement has fallen for 2 consecutive years in the U.S. workforce. Across the first quarter of 2022, Generation Z and younger Millennials report the lowest engagement across populations at 31%. More than half of this cohort, 54%, classified as “not engaged” in their workplace.
Why is quiet quitting gaining prominence now? COVID may play a role.
Many suggest that self-evaluation and establishing firmer boundaries is a logical response to emotional sequelae caused by COVID. Quiet quitting appears to have been fueled by the pandemic. Employees were forced into crisis mode by COVID; the lines between work, life, and home evaporated, allowing or forcing workers to evaluate their efficacy and satisfaction. With the structural impact of COVID reducing and a return to more standard work practices, it is expected that the job “rules” once held as truths come under evaluation and scrutiny.
Perhaps COVID has forced, and provided, another opportunity for us to closely examine our routines and habits and take stock of what really matters. Generations expectedly differ in their values and definitions of success. COVID has set prior established rules on fire, by forcing patterns and expectations that were neither expected nor wanted, within the context of a global health crisis. Within this backdrop, should we really believe our worth is determined by our job?
The truth is, we are still grieving what we lost during COVID and we have expectedly not assimilated to “the new normal.” Psychology has long recognized that losing structures and supports, routines and habits, causes symptoms of significant discomfort.
The idea that we would return to prior workplace expectations is naive. The idea we would “return to life as it was” is naive. It seems expected, then, that both employers and employees should evaluate their goals and communicate more openly about how each can be met.
It is incumbent upon the employers to set up clear guidelines regarding expectations, including rewards for performance and expectations for time, both within and outside of the work schedule. Employers must recognize symptoms of detachment in their employees and engage in the process of continuing clarifying roles and expectations while providing necessities for employees to succeed at their highest level. Employees, in turn, must self-examine their goals, communicate their needs, meet their responsibilities fully, and take on the challenge of determining their own definition of balance.
Maybe instead of quiet quitting, we should call it this new movement “self-awareness, growth, and evolution.” Hmmm, there’s an intriguing thought.
Dr. Calvery is professor of pediatrics at the University of Louisville (Ky.) She disclosed no relevant conflicts of interest.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
In the past few months, “quiet quitting” has garnered increasing traction across social media platforms. My morning review of social media revealed thousands of posts ranging from “Why doing less at work could be good for you – and your employer” to “After ‘quiet quitting’ here comes ‘quiet firing.’ ”
But quiet quitting is neither quiet nor quitting.
Quiet quitting is a misnomer. In addition, quiet quitters are firmer with their boundaries, do not take on work above and beyond clearly stated expectations, do not respond after hours, and do not feel like they are “not doing their job” when they are not immediately available.
Individuals who “quiet quit” continue to meet the demands of their job but reject the hustle-culture mentality that you must always be available for more work and, most importantly, that your value as person and self-worth are defined and determined by your work. Quiet quitters believe that it is possible to have good boundaries and yet remain productive, engaged, and active within the workplace.
Earlier this month, NPR’s posted tutorial on how to set better boundaries at work garnered 491,000 views, reflecting employees’ difficulties in communicating their needs, thoughts, and availability to their employers. Quiet quitting refers to not only rejecting the idea of going above and beyond in the workplace but also feeling confident that there will not be negative ramifications for not consistently working beyond the expected requirements.
A focus on balance, life, loves, and family is rarely addressed or emphasized by traditional employers; employees have little skill in addressing boundaries and clarifying their value and availability. For decades, “needing” flexibility of any kind or valuing activities as much as your job were viewed as negative attributes, making those individuals less-desired employees.
Data support the quiet quitting trend. Gallup data reveal that employee engagement has fallen for 2 consecutive years in the U.S. workforce. Across the first quarter of 2022, Generation Z and younger Millennials report the lowest engagement across populations at 31%. More than half of this cohort, 54%, classified as “not engaged” in their workplace.
Why is quiet quitting gaining prominence now? COVID may play a role.
Many suggest that self-evaluation and establishing firmer boundaries is a logical response to emotional sequelae caused by COVID. Quiet quitting appears to have been fueled by the pandemic. Employees were forced into crisis mode by COVID; the lines between work, life, and home evaporated, allowing or forcing workers to evaluate their efficacy and satisfaction. With the structural impact of COVID reducing and a return to more standard work practices, it is expected that the job “rules” once held as truths come under evaluation and scrutiny.
Perhaps COVID has forced, and provided, another opportunity for us to closely examine our routines and habits and take stock of what really matters. Generations expectedly differ in their values and definitions of success. COVID has set prior established rules on fire, by forcing patterns and expectations that were neither expected nor wanted, within the context of a global health crisis. Within this backdrop, should we really believe our worth is determined by our job?
The truth is, we are still grieving what we lost during COVID and we have expectedly not assimilated to “the new normal.” Psychology has long recognized that losing structures and supports, routines and habits, causes symptoms of significant discomfort.
The idea that we would return to prior workplace expectations is naive. The idea we would “return to life as it was” is naive. It seems expected, then, that both employers and employees should evaluate their goals and communicate more openly about how each can be met.
It is incumbent upon the employers to set up clear guidelines regarding expectations, including rewards for performance and expectations for time, both within and outside of the work schedule. Employers must recognize symptoms of detachment in their employees and engage in the process of continuing clarifying roles and expectations while providing necessities for employees to succeed at their highest level. Employees, in turn, must self-examine their goals, communicate their needs, meet their responsibilities fully, and take on the challenge of determining their own definition of balance.
Maybe instead of quiet quitting, we should call it this new movement “self-awareness, growth, and evolution.” Hmmm, there’s an intriguing thought.
Dr. Calvery is professor of pediatrics at the University of Louisville (Ky.) She disclosed no relevant conflicts of interest.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
Detachment predicts worse posttraumatic outcomes
The results highlight the importance of screening for dissociation in patients who have experienced trauma, study investigator Lauren A.M. Lebois, PhD, director of the dissociative disorders and trauma research program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., told this news organization.
“Clinicians could identify individuals potentially at risk of a chronic, more severe psychiatric course before these people go down that road, and they have the opportunity to connect folks with a phased trauma treatment approach to speed their recovery,” said Dr. Lebois, who is also an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Boston.
The study was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Underdiagnosed
Feelings of detachment or derealization are a type of dissociation. Patients with the syndrome report feeling foggy or as if they are in a dream. Dissociative diagnoses are not rare and, in fact, are more prevalent than schizophrenia.
Research supports a powerful relationship between dissociation and traumatic experiences. However, dissociation is among the most stigmatized of psychiatric conditions. Even among clinicians and researchers, beliefs about dissociation are often not based on the scientific literature, said Dr. Lebois.
“For instance, skepticism, misunderstanding, and lack of professional education about dissociation all contribute to striking rates of underdiagnosis and misdiagnoses,” she said.
Dr. Lebois and colleagues used data from the larger Advancing Understanding of Recovery After Trauma (AURORA) study and included 1,464 adults, mean age 35 years, appearing at 22 U.S. emergency departments. Patients experienced a traumatic event such as a motor vehicle crash or physical or sexual assault.
About 2 weeks after the trauma, participants reported symptoms of derealization as measured by a two-item version of the Brief Dissociative Experiences Scale.
Brain imaging data
A subset of 145 patients underwent functional MRI (fMRI), during which they completed an emotion reactivity task (viewing fearful-looking human faces) and a resting-state scan.
In addition to measuring history of childhood maltreatment, researchers assessed posttraumatic stress symptom severity at 2 weeks and again at 3 months using the posttraumatic stress disorder checklist. Also at 3 months, they measured depression and anxiety symptoms, pain, and functional impairment.
About 55% of self-report participants and 50% of MRI participants endorsed some level of persistent derealization at 2 weeks.
After controlling for potential confounders, including sex, age, childhood maltreatment, and current posttraumatic stress symptoms, researchers found persistent derealization was associated with increased ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity while viewing fearful faces.
The vmPFC helps to regulate emotional and physical reactions. “This region puts the ‘brakes’ on your emotional and physical reactivity – helping you to calm down” after a threatening or stressful experience has passed, said Dr. Lebois.
Researchers also found an association between higher self-reported derealization and decreased resting-state connectivity between the vmPFC and the orbitofrontal cortex and right lobule VIIIa – a region of the cerebellum involved in sensorimotor function.
“This may contribute to perceptual and affective distortions experienced during derealization – for example, feelings that surroundings are fading away, unreal, or strange,” said Dr. Lebois.
More pain, depression, anxiety
Higher levels of self-reported derealization at 2 weeks post trauma predicted higher levels of PTSD, anxiety, and depression as well as more bodily pain and impairment in work, family, and social life at 3 months.
“When we accounted for baseline levels of posttraumatic stress symptoms and trauma history, higher levels of self-reported derealization still predicted higher posttraumatic stress disorder and depression symptoms at 3 months,” said Dr. Lebois.
Additional adjusted analyses showed increased vmPFC activity during the fearful face task predicted 3-month self-reported PTSD symptoms.
Dr. Lebois “highly recommends” clinicians screen for dissociative symptoms, including derealization, in patients with trauma. Self-report screening tools are freely available online.
She noted patients with significant dissociative symptoms often do better with a “phase-oriented” approach to trauma treatment.
“In phase one, they learn emotional regulation skills to help them take more control over when they dissociate. Then they can successfully move on to trauma processing in phase two, which can involve exposure to trauma details.”
Although the field is not yet ready to use brain scans to diagnose dissociative symptoms, the new results “take us one step closer to being able to use objective neuroimaging biomarkers of derealization to augment subjective self-report measures,” said Dr. Lebois.
A limitation of the study was it could not determine a causal relationship, as some derealization may have been present before the traumatic event. The findings may not generalize to other types of dissociation, and the derealization assessment was measured only through a self-report 2 weeks after the trauma.
Another limitation was exclusion of patients with self-inflicted injuries or who were involved in domestic violence. The researchers noted the prevalence of derealization might have been even higher if such individuals were included.
An important investigation
In an accompanying editorial, Lisa M. Shin, PhD, department of psychology, Tufts University, and department of psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, notes having both clinical and neuroimaging variables as well as a large sample size makes the study “an important investigation” into predictors of psychiatric symptoms post-trauma.
Investigating a specific subtype of dissociation – persistent derealization – adds to the “novelty” of the study, she said.
The new findings “are certainly exciting for their potential clinical relevance and contributions to neurocircuitry models of PTSD,” she writes.
Some may argue administering a short, self-report measure of derealization “is far more efficient, cost-effective, and inclusive than conducting a specialized and expensive fMRI scan that is unlikely to be available to everyone,” notes Dr. Shin.
However, she added, a potential benefit of such a scan is identification of specific brain regions as potential targets for intervention. “For example, the results of this and other studies suggest that the vmPFC is a reasonable target for transcranial magnetic stimulation or its variants.”
The new results need to be replicated in a large, independent sample, said Dr. Shin. She added it would be helpful to know if other types of dissociation, and activation in other subregions of the vmPFC, also predict psychiatric outcomes after a trauma.
The study was supported by National Institute of Mental Health grants, the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command, One Mind, and the Mayday Fund. Dr. Lebois has received grant support from NIMH, and her spouse receives payments from Vanderbilt University for technology licensed to Acadia Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Shin receives textbook-related royalties from Pearson.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
The results highlight the importance of screening for dissociation in patients who have experienced trauma, study investigator Lauren A.M. Lebois, PhD, director of the dissociative disorders and trauma research program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., told this news organization.
“Clinicians could identify individuals potentially at risk of a chronic, more severe psychiatric course before these people go down that road, and they have the opportunity to connect folks with a phased trauma treatment approach to speed their recovery,” said Dr. Lebois, who is also an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Boston.
The study was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Underdiagnosed
Feelings of detachment or derealization are a type of dissociation. Patients with the syndrome report feeling foggy or as if they are in a dream. Dissociative diagnoses are not rare and, in fact, are more prevalent than schizophrenia.
Research supports a powerful relationship between dissociation and traumatic experiences. However, dissociation is among the most stigmatized of psychiatric conditions. Even among clinicians and researchers, beliefs about dissociation are often not based on the scientific literature, said Dr. Lebois.
“For instance, skepticism, misunderstanding, and lack of professional education about dissociation all contribute to striking rates of underdiagnosis and misdiagnoses,” she said.
Dr. Lebois and colleagues used data from the larger Advancing Understanding of Recovery After Trauma (AURORA) study and included 1,464 adults, mean age 35 years, appearing at 22 U.S. emergency departments. Patients experienced a traumatic event such as a motor vehicle crash or physical or sexual assault.
About 2 weeks after the trauma, participants reported symptoms of derealization as measured by a two-item version of the Brief Dissociative Experiences Scale.
Brain imaging data
A subset of 145 patients underwent functional MRI (fMRI), during which they completed an emotion reactivity task (viewing fearful-looking human faces) and a resting-state scan.
In addition to measuring history of childhood maltreatment, researchers assessed posttraumatic stress symptom severity at 2 weeks and again at 3 months using the posttraumatic stress disorder checklist. Also at 3 months, they measured depression and anxiety symptoms, pain, and functional impairment.
About 55% of self-report participants and 50% of MRI participants endorsed some level of persistent derealization at 2 weeks.
After controlling for potential confounders, including sex, age, childhood maltreatment, and current posttraumatic stress symptoms, researchers found persistent derealization was associated with increased ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity while viewing fearful faces.
The vmPFC helps to regulate emotional and physical reactions. “This region puts the ‘brakes’ on your emotional and physical reactivity – helping you to calm down” after a threatening or stressful experience has passed, said Dr. Lebois.
Researchers also found an association between higher self-reported derealization and decreased resting-state connectivity between the vmPFC and the orbitofrontal cortex and right lobule VIIIa – a region of the cerebellum involved in sensorimotor function.
“This may contribute to perceptual and affective distortions experienced during derealization – for example, feelings that surroundings are fading away, unreal, or strange,” said Dr. Lebois.
More pain, depression, anxiety
Higher levels of self-reported derealization at 2 weeks post trauma predicted higher levels of PTSD, anxiety, and depression as well as more bodily pain and impairment in work, family, and social life at 3 months.
“When we accounted for baseline levels of posttraumatic stress symptoms and trauma history, higher levels of self-reported derealization still predicted higher posttraumatic stress disorder and depression symptoms at 3 months,” said Dr. Lebois.
Additional adjusted analyses showed increased vmPFC activity during the fearful face task predicted 3-month self-reported PTSD symptoms.
Dr. Lebois “highly recommends” clinicians screen for dissociative symptoms, including derealization, in patients with trauma. Self-report screening tools are freely available online.
She noted patients with significant dissociative symptoms often do better with a “phase-oriented” approach to trauma treatment.
“In phase one, they learn emotional regulation skills to help them take more control over when they dissociate. Then they can successfully move on to trauma processing in phase two, which can involve exposure to trauma details.”
Although the field is not yet ready to use brain scans to diagnose dissociative symptoms, the new results “take us one step closer to being able to use objective neuroimaging biomarkers of derealization to augment subjective self-report measures,” said Dr. Lebois.
A limitation of the study was it could not determine a causal relationship, as some derealization may have been present before the traumatic event. The findings may not generalize to other types of dissociation, and the derealization assessment was measured only through a self-report 2 weeks after the trauma.
Another limitation was exclusion of patients with self-inflicted injuries or who were involved in domestic violence. The researchers noted the prevalence of derealization might have been even higher if such individuals were included.
An important investigation
In an accompanying editorial, Lisa M. Shin, PhD, department of psychology, Tufts University, and department of psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, notes having both clinical and neuroimaging variables as well as a large sample size makes the study “an important investigation” into predictors of psychiatric symptoms post-trauma.
Investigating a specific subtype of dissociation – persistent derealization – adds to the “novelty” of the study, she said.
The new findings “are certainly exciting for their potential clinical relevance and contributions to neurocircuitry models of PTSD,” she writes.
Some may argue administering a short, self-report measure of derealization “is far more efficient, cost-effective, and inclusive than conducting a specialized and expensive fMRI scan that is unlikely to be available to everyone,” notes Dr. Shin.
However, she added, a potential benefit of such a scan is identification of specific brain regions as potential targets for intervention. “For example, the results of this and other studies suggest that the vmPFC is a reasonable target for transcranial magnetic stimulation or its variants.”
The new results need to be replicated in a large, independent sample, said Dr. Shin. She added it would be helpful to know if other types of dissociation, and activation in other subregions of the vmPFC, also predict psychiatric outcomes after a trauma.
The study was supported by National Institute of Mental Health grants, the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command, One Mind, and the Mayday Fund. Dr. Lebois has received grant support from NIMH, and her spouse receives payments from Vanderbilt University for technology licensed to Acadia Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Shin receives textbook-related royalties from Pearson.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
The results highlight the importance of screening for dissociation in patients who have experienced trauma, study investigator Lauren A.M. Lebois, PhD, director of the dissociative disorders and trauma research program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., told this news organization.
“Clinicians could identify individuals potentially at risk of a chronic, more severe psychiatric course before these people go down that road, and they have the opportunity to connect folks with a phased trauma treatment approach to speed their recovery,” said Dr. Lebois, who is also an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Boston.
The study was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Underdiagnosed
Feelings of detachment or derealization are a type of dissociation. Patients with the syndrome report feeling foggy or as if they are in a dream. Dissociative diagnoses are not rare and, in fact, are more prevalent than schizophrenia.
Research supports a powerful relationship between dissociation and traumatic experiences. However, dissociation is among the most stigmatized of psychiatric conditions. Even among clinicians and researchers, beliefs about dissociation are often not based on the scientific literature, said Dr. Lebois.
“For instance, skepticism, misunderstanding, and lack of professional education about dissociation all contribute to striking rates of underdiagnosis and misdiagnoses,” she said.
Dr. Lebois and colleagues used data from the larger Advancing Understanding of Recovery After Trauma (AURORA) study and included 1,464 adults, mean age 35 years, appearing at 22 U.S. emergency departments. Patients experienced a traumatic event such as a motor vehicle crash or physical or sexual assault.
About 2 weeks after the trauma, participants reported symptoms of derealization as measured by a two-item version of the Brief Dissociative Experiences Scale.
Brain imaging data
A subset of 145 patients underwent functional MRI (fMRI), during which they completed an emotion reactivity task (viewing fearful-looking human faces) and a resting-state scan.
In addition to measuring history of childhood maltreatment, researchers assessed posttraumatic stress symptom severity at 2 weeks and again at 3 months using the posttraumatic stress disorder checklist. Also at 3 months, they measured depression and anxiety symptoms, pain, and functional impairment.
About 55% of self-report participants and 50% of MRI participants endorsed some level of persistent derealization at 2 weeks.
After controlling for potential confounders, including sex, age, childhood maltreatment, and current posttraumatic stress symptoms, researchers found persistent derealization was associated with increased ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity while viewing fearful faces.
The vmPFC helps to regulate emotional and physical reactions. “This region puts the ‘brakes’ on your emotional and physical reactivity – helping you to calm down” after a threatening or stressful experience has passed, said Dr. Lebois.
Researchers also found an association between higher self-reported derealization and decreased resting-state connectivity between the vmPFC and the orbitofrontal cortex and right lobule VIIIa – a region of the cerebellum involved in sensorimotor function.
“This may contribute to perceptual and affective distortions experienced during derealization – for example, feelings that surroundings are fading away, unreal, or strange,” said Dr. Lebois.
More pain, depression, anxiety
Higher levels of self-reported derealization at 2 weeks post trauma predicted higher levels of PTSD, anxiety, and depression as well as more bodily pain and impairment in work, family, and social life at 3 months.
“When we accounted for baseline levels of posttraumatic stress symptoms and trauma history, higher levels of self-reported derealization still predicted higher posttraumatic stress disorder and depression symptoms at 3 months,” said Dr. Lebois.
Additional adjusted analyses showed increased vmPFC activity during the fearful face task predicted 3-month self-reported PTSD symptoms.
Dr. Lebois “highly recommends” clinicians screen for dissociative symptoms, including derealization, in patients with trauma. Self-report screening tools are freely available online.
She noted patients with significant dissociative symptoms often do better with a “phase-oriented” approach to trauma treatment.
“In phase one, they learn emotional regulation skills to help them take more control over when they dissociate. Then they can successfully move on to trauma processing in phase two, which can involve exposure to trauma details.”
Although the field is not yet ready to use brain scans to diagnose dissociative symptoms, the new results “take us one step closer to being able to use objective neuroimaging biomarkers of derealization to augment subjective self-report measures,” said Dr. Lebois.
A limitation of the study was it could not determine a causal relationship, as some derealization may have been present before the traumatic event. The findings may not generalize to other types of dissociation, and the derealization assessment was measured only through a self-report 2 weeks after the trauma.
Another limitation was exclusion of patients with self-inflicted injuries or who were involved in domestic violence. The researchers noted the prevalence of derealization might have been even higher if such individuals were included.
An important investigation
In an accompanying editorial, Lisa M. Shin, PhD, department of psychology, Tufts University, and department of psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, notes having both clinical and neuroimaging variables as well as a large sample size makes the study “an important investigation” into predictors of psychiatric symptoms post-trauma.
Investigating a specific subtype of dissociation – persistent derealization – adds to the “novelty” of the study, she said.
The new findings “are certainly exciting for their potential clinical relevance and contributions to neurocircuitry models of PTSD,” she writes.
Some may argue administering a short, self-report measure of derealization “is far more efficient, cost-effective, and inclusive than conducting a specialized and expensive fMRI scan that is unlikely to be available to everyone,” notes Dr. Shin.
However, she added, a potential benefit of such a scan is identification of specific brain regions as potential targets for intervention. “For example, the results of this and other studies suggest that the vmPFC is a reasonable target for transcranial magnetic stimulation or its variants.”
The new results need to be replicated in a large, independent sample, said Dr. Shin. She added it would be helpful to know if other types of dissociation, and activation in other subregions of the vmPFC, also predict psychiatric outcomes after a trauma.
The study was supported by National Institute of Mental Health grants, the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command, One Mind, and the Mayday Fund. Dr. Lebois has received grant support from NIMH, and her spouse receives payments from Vanderbilt University for technology licensed to Acadia Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Shin receives textbook-related royalties from Pearson.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
FROM AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY
Depression as a terminal illness
Is there a place for palliative care?
In 2020, there were 5,224 suicide deaths registered in England and Wales.1 The Mental Health Foundation, a London-based charitable organization, reports that approximately 70% of such deaths are in patients with depression.2 The number of attempted suicides is much higher – the South West London and St. George’s Mental Health Trust estimates that at least 140,000 people attempt suicide in England and Wales every year.3
In suicidal depression, the psychological pain is often unbearable and feels overwhelmingly incompatible with life. One is no longer living but merely surviving, and eventually the exhaustion will lead to decompensation. This is marked by suicide. The goal is to end the suffering permanently and this is achieved through death.
Depression, like all other physical and mental illnesses, runs a course. This is highly variable between individuals and can be the case even between separate relapse episodes in the same patient. Like many diagnoses, depression is known to lead to death in a significant number of people. Many suicidally depressed patients feel that death will be an inevitable result of the illness.
Suicide is often viewed as a symptom of severe depression, but what if we considered death as part of the disease process itself? Consequently, would it be justifiable to consider depression in these patients as a form of terminal illness, since without treatment, the condition would lead to death? Accordingly, could there be a place for palliative care in a small minority of suicidally depressed patients? Taking such a perspective would mean that instead of placing the focus on the prevention of deaths and prolonging of lifespan, the focus would be on making the patients comfortable as the disease progresses, maintaining their dignity, and promoting autonomy.
Suicidal depression and rights
The rationale for this is that psychiatric patients do not have the capacity to make such decisions in the acute setting, because of the direct effects of the unwell mind on their decision-making processes and cognitive faculties. While this may be true in some cases, there is limited evidence that this applies to all suicidally depressed patients in all cases.
Another argument against allowing suicidally depressed patients to decline treatment is the notion that the episode of depression can be successfully treated, and the patients can return to their normal level of functioning. However, in individuals with a previous history of severe depression, it is possible that they will relapse again at some point. In the same way, a cancer can be treated, and patients could return to their baseline level of functioning, only for the cancer to then return later in life. In both cases, these relapses are emotionally and physically exhausting and painful to get through. The difference is that a cancer patient can decline further treatment and opt for no treatment or for palliative treatment, knowing that the disease will shorten life expectancy. For suicidal depression, this is not an option. Such patients may be sectioned, admitted, and treated against their will. Suicide, which could be considered a natural endpoint of the depressive illness, is unacceptable.
Is it fair to confiscate one’s right to decline treatment, solely because that person suffers from a mental illness, as opposed to a physical one? Numerous studies have demonstrated clear structural, neurological, and neurochemical changes in suicidal depression. This is evidence that such a condition encompasses a clear physical property. Other conditions, such as dementia and chronic pain, have previously been accepted for euthanasia in certain countries. Pain is a subjective experience of nociceptive and neurochemical signaling. In the same way, depression is a subjective experience involving aberrant neurochemical signaling. The difference is that physical pain can often be localized. However, patients with suicidal depression often experience very severe and tangible pain that can be difficult to articulate and for others to understand if they have never experienced it themselves.
Like distinct forms of physical pain, suicidal depression creates a different form of pain, but it is pain, nonetheless. Is it therefore fair for suicidally depressed patients to be given lesser rights than those suffering from physical illnesses in determining their fate?
Suicidal depression and capacity
A patient is assumed to have capacity unless proven otherwise. This is often the reverse when managing psychiatric patients. However, if patients are able to fulfill all criteria required for demonstrating capacity (understanding the information, retaining, weighing up, and communicating the decision), surely they have demonstrated capacity to make their decisions, whether that is to receive or to refuse treatment.
For physical illnesses, adults with capacity are permitted to make decisions that their treating teams may not agree with, but this disagreement alone is generally insufficient to override the decisions. These patients, unlike in suicidal depression, have the right to refuse lifesaving or life-prolonging treatment.
An argument for this is that in terminal physical illnesses, death is a passive process and neither the patient nor the physician are actively causing it. However, in many palliative settings, patients can be given medications and treatment for symptomatic relief, even if these may hasten their death. The principle that makes this permissible is that the primary aim is to improve the symptoms and ensure comfort. The unintended effect includes side effects and hastened death. Similarly, in suicidal depression, one could argue that the patient should be permitted medications that may hasten or lead to death, so long as the primary aim is to improve the symptoms of the unbearable mental pain and suffering.
Let us consider an alternative scenario. What if previously suicidal patients are currently in remission from depression and make advanced directives? In their current healthy state, they assert that if, in the future, they were to relapse, they would not want any form of treatment. Instead, they wish for the disease to run its course, which may end in death through suicide.
In this case, the circumstances in which the statement was made would be entirely valid – the patients at that moment have capacity, are not under coercion, are able to articulate logical thought processes, and their reasoning would not be affected by a concurrent psychiatric pathology. Furthermore, they can demonstrate that suicide is not an impulsive decision and have considered the consequences of suicide on themselves and others. If the patients can demonstrate all the above, what would the ethical grounds be for refusing this advanced directive?
Medical ethics
Below, I consider this debate in the context of four pillars of medical ethics.
Non-maleficence
To determine whether an action is in line with non-maleficence, one must ask whether the proposed treatment will improve or resolve one’s condition. In the case of severe suicidal depression, the treatment may help patients in the short term, but what happens if or when they relapse? The treatment will likely prolong life, but also inadvertently prolong suffering. What if the patients do not wish to go through this again? The treatment regime can be profoundly taxing for the patients, the loved ones, and sometimes even for the treating team. Are we doing more harm by forcing these patients to stay alive against their will?
Beneficence
Beneficence is the moral duty to promote the action that is in the patient’s best interest. But who should determine what the patient’s best interests are if the patient and the doctor disagree? Usually, this decision is made by the treating doctor, who considers the patient’s past and present wishes, beliefs and values, and capacity assessment. Supposing that the law was not a restriction, could one’s psychiatrist ever agree on psychiatric grounds alone that it is indeed in the patient’s best interests to die?
Doctors play a central role in the duty of care. But care does not always mean active treatment. Caring encompasses physical, psychological, and spiritual welfare and includes considering an individual patient’s dignity, personal circumstances, and wishes. In certain circumstances, keeping patients with capacity alive against their wishes could be more harmful than caring.
Autonomy
Autonomy gives the patients ultimate decision-making responsibility for their own lives. It allows patients with capacity to decline treatment that is recommended by their physicians and to make decisions regarding their own death. However, in suicidally depressed patients, this autonomy is confiscated. Severely unwell patients, at high risk of committing suicide, are not permitted the autonomy to make the decision regarding their treatment, suicide, and death.
Justice
A justice-orientated and utilitarian view questions whether spending resources on these patients wastes time, resources, and expertise, and whether resources should instead be spent on patients who do want treatment.
For example, the British National Health Service holds an outstanding debt of £13.4 billion.4 The financial cost of treating mental illness in 2020/2021 was £14.31 billion.5 The NHS estimates that wider costs to national economy, including welfare benefits, housing support, social workers, community support, lost productivity at work, etc., amounts to approximately £77 billion annually.6 Many severely depressed patients are so unwell that their ability to contribute to society, financially, socially, and otherwise, is minimal. If patients with capacity genuinely want to die and society would benefit from a reduction in the pressures on health and social care services, would it not be in both their best interests to allow them to die? This way, resources could be redirected to service users who would appreciate and benefit from them the most.
A consequentialist view focuses on whether the action will benefit the patient overall; the action itself is not so relevant. According to this view, keeping suicidally depressed patients alive against their wishes would be ethical if the patients lack capacity. Keeping them safe and treating them until they are better would overall be in the patients’ best interests. However, if the patients do have capacity and wish to die, forcing them to stay alive and undergo treatment against their wishes would merely prolong their suffering and thus could be considered unethical.
When enough is enough
In suicidal treatment-resistant depression, where the patient has tried multiple treatments over time and carefully considered alternatives, when is it time to stop trying? For physical illness, patients can refuse treatment provided they can demonstrate capacity. In depression, they can refuse treatment only if they can demonstrate that they are not at serious risk to themselves or others. Most societies consider suicide as a serious risk to self and therefore unacceptable. However, if we considered suicide as a natural endpoint of the disease process, should the patient have the right to refuse treatment and allow the disease to progress to death?
The treatment regime can be a lengthy process and the repeated failures to improve can be physically and mentally exhausting and further compound the hopelessness. Treatments often have side effects, which further erode the patient’s physical and mental wellbeing. Is there a time when giving up and withdrawing active treatment is in the patient’s best interests, especially if that is what the patient wants?
Terminal diseases are incurable and likely to hasten one’s death. Severe suicidal treatment-resistant depression conforms to both conditions – it is unresponsive to treatment and has a high likelihood of precipitating premature death through suicide. Most terminal illnesses can be managed with palliative treatment. In the context of severe suicidal depression, euthanasia and assisted suicide could be considered as means of palliative care.
Palliative care involves managing the patient’s symptomatology, dignity, and comfort. Euthanasia and assisted suicide help to address all of these. Like palliative care, euthanasia and assisted suicide aim to improve symptoms of depression by alleviating pain and suffering, even if they may hasten death.
Euthanasia and assisted suicide in severe depression
Euthanasia and assisted suicide are legal in seven countries. Two countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) permit euthanasia for psychiatric illnesses. Passive euthanasia is practiced in most countries, e.g., withholding artificial life support. In suicidal depression, it could be considered that this withholding of treatment may directly lead to death by suicide.
In active euthanasia and assisted suicide, the patient is given a chemical that will directly lead to death. Euthanasia and assisted suicide allow individuals to die with dignity in a controlled and organized manner. It ends the patients’ suffering and allows them to finally find peace. The difficulties that led them to seek euthanasia/assisted suicide indicate a loss of control of the pain and suffering in life, and euthanasia allows them to regain this control and autonomy through death. It allows these individuals to properly say goodbye to their loved ones, and a chance to share their thoughts and feelings.
In contrast, suicide is often covert, clandestine, and planned in secret, and it frequently requires individuals to be dishonest with their closest loved ones. The suicide often comes as a shock to the loved ones and profound grief, questions, anger, pain, sorrow, and guilt follow. These are due to questions that have been left unanswered, thoughts that were never shared, regret that they had not done more to help, and anguish knowing that their loved one died alone, in unbearable mental agony, unable to speak to anyone about this final hurdle.
Euthanasia and assisted suicide provide a path to overcome all these issues. They encourage open conversations between the patients, their loved ones, and the treating team. They promote transparency, mutual support, and help prepare the loved ones for the death. In this way, euthanasia and assisted suicide can benefit both the patient and the loved ones.
A significant proportion of severely suicidally depressed patients will eventually go on to commit or attempt suicide. Thus, giving them the autonomy to choose euthanasia or assisted suicide could be considered a kind, fair, and compassionate course of action, as it respects their wishes, and allows them to escape their suffering and to die with dignity.
Conclusion
Depression has historically never been considered a terminal illness, but there is undeniable evidence that a significant number of deaths every year are directly caused by depression. Should we therefore shift the focus from lifesaving and life-prolonging treatment to ensuring comfort and maintaining dignity by exploring palliative options for extremely suicidally depressed patients with capacity, who are adamant on ending their lives?
Euthanasia and assisted suicide for depression pose a profound paradox when viewed through a deontological lens. According to this, the correct course of action directly corresponds to what the most “moral” action would be. The moral stance would be to help those who are suffering. But what exactly constitutes “help”? Are euthanasia and assisted suicide helping or harming? Likewise, is keeping patients with capacity alive against their wishes helping or harming? Many believe that euthanasia, assisted suicide, and suicide itself are intrinsically and morally wrong. But this poses another clear impasse. Who should be the ones to decide whether an action is moral or not? Should it be the individual? The treating physician? Or society?
Dr. Chang graduated from Imperial College London with an MBBS (medicine and surgery) and a BSc (gastroenterology and hepatology) degree.
References
1. Office for National Statistics. Suicides in England and Wales – Office for National Statistics, 2021.
2. Faulkner, A. Suicide and Deliberate Self Harm: The Fundamental Facts. Mental Health Foundation; 1997.
3. NHS. Suicide Factsheet. Southwest London and St. George’s Mental Health NHS Trust [ebook], 2022.
4. The King’s Fund. Financial debts and loans in the NHS. 2020.
5. NHS England. Mental Health Five Year Forward View Dashboard. 2018.
6. National Mental Health, Policy into Practice. The costs of mental ill health.
Is there a place for palliative care?
Is there a place for palliative care?
In 2020, there were 5,224 suicide deaths registered in England and Wales.1 The Mental Health Foundation, a London-based charitable organization, reports that approximately 70% of such deaths are in patients with depression.2 The number of attempted suicides is much higher – the South West London and St. George’s Mental Health Trust estimates that at least 140,000 people attempt suicide in England and Wales every year.3
In suicidal depression, the psychological pain is often unbearable and feels overwhelmingly incompatible with life. One is no longer living but merely surviving, and eventually the exhaustion will lead to decompensation. This is marked by suicide. The goal is to end the suffering permanently and this is achieved through death.
Depression, like all other physical and mental illnesses, runs a course. This is highly variable between individuals and can be the case even between separate relapse episodes in the same patient. Like many diagnoses, depression is known to lead to death in a significant number of people. Many suicidally depressed patients feel that death will be an inevitable result of the illness.
Suicide is often viewed as a symptom of severe depression, but what if we considered death as part of the disease process itself? Consequently, would it be justifiable to consider depression in these patients as a form of terminal illness, since without treatment, the condition would lead to death? Accordingly, could there be a place for palliative care in a small minority of suicidally depressed patients? Taking such a perspective would mean that instead of placing the focus on the prevention of deaths and prolonging of lifespan, the focus would be on making the patients comfortable as the disease progresses, maintaining their dignity, and promoting autonomy.
Suicidal depression and rights
The rationale for this is that psychiatric patients do not have the capacity to make such decisions in the acute setting, because of the direct effects of the unwell mind on their decision-making processes and cognitive faculties. While this may be true in some cases, there is limited evidence that this applies to all suicidally depressed patients in all cases.
Another argument against allowing suicidally depressed patients to decline treatment is the notion that the episode of depression can be successfully treated, and the patients can return to their normal level of functioning. However, in individuals with a previous history of severe depression, it is possible that they will relapse again at some point. In the same way, a cancer can be treated, and patients could return to their baseline level of functioning, only for the cancer to then return later in life. In both cases, these relapses are emotionally and physically exhausting and painful to get through. The difference is that a cancer patient can decline further treatment and opt for no treatment or for palliative treatment, knowing that the disease will shorten life expectancy. For suicidal depression, this is not an option. Such patients may be sectioned, admitted, and treated against their will. Suicide, which could be considered a natural endpoint of the depressive illness, is unacceptable.
Is it fair to confiscate one’s right to decline treatment, solely because that person suffers from a mental illness, as opposed to a physical one? Numerous studies have demonstrated clear structural, neurological, and neurochemical changes in suicidal depression. This is evidence that such a condition encompasses a clear physical property. Other conditions, such as dementia and chronic pain, have previously been accepted for euthanasia in certain countries. Pain is a subjective experience of nociceptive and neurochemical signaling. In the same way, depression is a subjective experience involving aberrant neurochemical signaling. The difference is that physical pain can often be localized. However, patients with suicidal depression often experience very severe and tangible pain that can be difficult to articulate and for others to understand if they have never experienced it themselves.
Like distinct forms of physical pain, suicidal depression creates a different form of pain, but it is pain, nonetheless. Is it therefore fair for suicidally depressed patients to be given lesser rights than those suffering from physical illnesses in determining their fate?
Suicidal depression and capacity
A patient is assumed to have capacity unless proven otherwise. This is often the reverse when managing psychiatric patients. However, if patients are able to fulfill all criteria required for demonstrating capacity (understanding the information, retaining, weighing up, and communicating the decision), surely they have demonstrated capacity to make their decisions, whether that is to receive or to refuse treatment.
For physical illnesses, adults with capacity are permitted to make decisions that their treating teams may not agree with, but this disagreement alone is generally insufficient to override the decisions. These patients, unlike in suicidal depression, have the right to refuse lifesaving or life-prolonging treatment.
An argument for this is that in terminal physical illnesses, death is a passive process and neither the patient nor the physician are actively causing it. However, in many palliative settings, patients can be given medications and treatment for symptomatic relief, even if these may hasten their death. The principle that makes this permissible is that the primary aim is to improve the symptoms and ensure comfort. The unintended effect includes side effects and hastened death. Similarly, in suicidal depression, one could argue that the patient should be permitted medications that may hasten or lead to death, so long as the primary aim is to improve the symptoms of the unbearable mental pain and suffering.
Let us consider an alternative scenario. What if previously suicidal patients are currently in remission from depression and make advanced directives? In their current healthy state, they assert that if, in the future, they were to relapse, they would not want any form of treatment. Instead, they wish for the disease to run its course, which may end in death through suicide.
In this case, the circumstances in which the statement was made would be entirely valid – the patients at that moment have capacity, are not under coercion, are able to articulate logical thought processes, and their reasoning would not be affected by a concurrent psychiatric pathology. Furthermore, they can demonstrate that suicide is not an impulsive decision and have considered the consequences of suicide on themselves and others. If the patients can demonstrate all the above, what would the ethical grounds be for refusing this advanced directive?
Medical ethics
Below, I consider this debate in the context of four pillars of medical ethics.
Non-maleficence
To determine whether an action is in line with non-maleficence, one must ask whether the proposed treatment will improve or resolve one’s condition. In the case of severe suicidal depression, the treatment may help patients in the short term, but what happens if or when they relapse? The treatment will likely prolong life, but also inadvertently prolong suffering. What if the patients do not wish to go through this again? The treatment regime can be profoundly taxing for the patients, the loved ones, and sometimes even for the treating team. Are we doing more harm by forcing these patients to stay alive against their will?
Beneficence
Beneficence is the moral duty to promote the action that is in the patient’s best interest. But who should determine what the patient’s best interests are if the patient and the doctor disagree? Usually, this decision is made by the treating doctor, who considers the patient’s past and present wishes, beliefs and values, and capacity assessment. Supposing that the law was not a restriction, could one’s psychiatrist ever agree on psychiatric grounds alone that it is indeed in the patient’s best interests to die?
Doctors play a central role in the duty of care. But care does not always mean active treatment. Caring encompasses physical, psychological, and spiritual welfare and includes considering an individual patient’s dignity, personal circumstances, and wishes. In certain circumstances, keeping patients with capacity alive against their wishes could be more harmful than caring.
Autonomy
Autonomy gives the patients ultimate decision-making responsibility for their own lives. It allows patients with capacity to decline treatment that is recommended by their physicians and to make decisions regarding their own death. However, in suicidally depressed patients, this autonomy is confiscated. Severely unwell patients, at high risk of committing suicide, are not permitted the autonomy to make the decision regarding their treatment, suicide, and death.
Justice
A justice-orientated and utilitarian view questions whether spending resources on these patients wastes time, resources, and expertise, and whether resources should instead be spent on patients who do want treatment.
For example, the British National Health Service holds an outstanding debt of £13.4 billion.4 The financial cost of treating mental illness in 2020/2021 was £14.31 billion.5 The NHS estimates that wider costs to national economy, including welfare benefits, housing support, social workers, community support, lost productivity at work, etc., amounts to approximately £77 billion annually.6 Many severely depressed patients are so unwell that their ability to contribute to society, financially, socially, and otherwise, is minimal. If patients with capacity genuinely want to die and society would benefit from a reduction in the pressures on health and social care services, would it not be in both their best interests to allow them to die? This way, resources could be redirected to service users who would appreciate and benefit from them the most.
A consequentialist view focuses on whether the action will benefit the patient overall; the action itself is not so relevant. According to this view, keeping suicidally depressed patients alive against their wishes would be ethical if the patients lack capacity. Keeping them safe and treating them until they are better would overall be in the patients’ best interests. However, if the patients do have capacity and wish to die, forcing them to stay alive and undergo treatment against their wishes would merely prolong their suffering and thus could be considered unethical.
When enough is enough
In suicidal treatment-resistant depression, where the patient has tried multiple treatments over time and carefully considered alternatives, when is it time to stop trying? For physical illness, patients can refuse treatment provided they can demonstrate capacity. In depression, they can refuse treatment only if they can demonstrate that they are not at serious risk to themselves or others. Most societies consider suicide as a serious risk to self and therefore unacceptable. However, if we considered suicide as a natural endpoint of the disease process, should the patient have the right to refuse treatment and allow the disease to progress to death?
The treatment regime can be a lengthy process and the repeated failures to improve can be physically and mentally exhausting and further compound the hopelessness. Treatments often have side effects, which further erode the patient’s physical and mental wellbeing. Is there a time when giving up and withdrawing active treatment is in the patient’s best interests, especially if that is what the patient wants?
Terminal diseases are incurable and likely to hasten one’s death. Severe suicidal treatment-resistant depression conforms to both conditions – it is unresponsive to treatment and has a high likelihood of precipitating premature death through suicide. Most terminal illnesses can be managed with palliative treatment. In the context of severe suicidal depression, euthanasia and assisted suicide could be considered as means of palliative care.
Palliative care involves managing the patient’s symptomatology, dignity, and comfort. Euthanasia and assisted suicide help to address all of these. Like palliative care, euthanasia and assisted suicide aim to improve symptoms of depression by alleviating pain and suffering, even if they may hasten death.
Euthanasia and assisted suicide in severe depression
Euthanasia and assisted suicide are legal in seven countries. Two countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) permit euthanasia for psychiatric illnesses. Passive euthanasia is practiced in most countries, e.g., withholding artificial life support. In suicidal depression, it could be considered that this withholding of treatment may directly lead to death by suicide.
In active euthanasia and assisted suicide, the patient is given a chemical that will directly lead to death. Euthanasia and assisted suicide allow individuals to die with dignity in a controlled and organized manner. It ends the patients’ suffering and allows them to finally find peace. The difficulties that led them to seek euthanasia/assisted suicide indicate a loss of control of the pain and suffering in life, and euthanasia allows them to regain this control and autonomy through death. It allows these individuals to properly say goodbye to their loved ones, and a chance to share their thoughts and feelings.
In contrast, suicide is often covert, clandestine, and planned in secret, and it frequently requires individuals to be dishonest with their closest loved ones. The suicide often comes as a shock to the loved ones and profound grief, questions, anger, pain, sorrow, and guilt follow. These are due to questions that have been left unanswered, thoughts that were never shared, regret that they had not done more to help, and anguish knowing that their loved one died alone, in unbearable mental agony, unable to speak to anyone about this final hurdle.
Euthanasia and assisted suicide provide a path to overcome all these issues. They encourage open conversations between the patients, their loved ones, and the treating team. They promote transparency, mutual support, and help prepare the loved ones for the death. In this way, euthanasia and assisted suicide can benefit both the patient and the loved ones.
A significant proportion of severely suicidally depressed patients will eventually go on to commit or attempt suicide. Thus, giving them the autonomy to choose euthanasia or assisted suicide could be considered a kind, fair, and compassionate course of action, as it respects their wishes, and allows them to escape their suffering and to die with dignity.
Conclusion
Depression has historically never been considered a terminal illness, but there is undeniable evidence that a significant number of deaths every year are directly caused by depression. Should we therefore shift the focus from lifesaving and life-prolonging treatment to ensuring comfort and maintaining dignity by exploring palliative options for extremely suicidally depressed patients with capacity, who are adamant on ending their lives?
Euthanasia and assisted suicide for depression pose a profound paradox when viewed through a deontological lens. According to this, the correct course of action directly corresponds to what the most “moral” action would be. The moral stance would be to help those who are suffering. But what exactly constitutes “help”? Are euthanasia and assisted suicide helping or harming? Likewise, is keeping patients with capacity alive against their wishes helping or harming? Many believe that euthanasia, assisted suicide, and suicide itself are intrinsically and morally wrong. But this poses another clear impasse. Who should be the ones to decide whether an action is moral or not? Should it be the individual? The treating physician? Or society?
Dr. Chang graduated from Imperial College London with an MBBS (medicine and surgery) and a BSc (gastroenterology and hepatology) degree.
References
1. Office for National Statistics. Suicides in England and Wales – Office for National Statistics, 2021.
2. Faulkner, A. Suicide and Deliberate Self Harm: The Fundamental Facts. Mental Health Foundation; 1997.
3. NHS. Suicide Factsheet. Southwest London and St. George’s Mental Health NHS Trust [ebook], 2022.
4. The King’s Fund. Financial debts and loans in the NHS. 2020.
5. NHS England. Mental Health Five Year Forward View Dashboard. 2018.
6. National Mental Health, Policy into Practice. The costs of mental ill health.
In 2020, there were 5,224 suicide deaths registered in England and Wales.1 The Mental Health Foundation, a London-based charitable organization, reports that approximately 70% of such deaths are in patients with depression.2 The number of attempted suicides is much higher – the South West London and St. George’s Mental Health Trust estimates that at least 140,000 people attempt suicide in England and Wales every year.3
In suicidal depression, the psychological pain is often unbearable and feels overwhelmingly incompatible with life. One is no longer living but merely surviving, and eventually the exhaustion will lead to decompensation. This is marked by suicide. The goal is to end the suffering permanently and this is achieved through death.
Depression, like all other physical and mental illnesses, runs a course. This is highly variable between individuals and can be the case even between separate relapse episodes in the same patient. Like many diagnoses, depression is known to lead to death in a significant number of people. Many suicidally depressed patients feel that death will be an inevitable result of the illness.
Suicide is often viewed as a symptom of severe depression, but what if we considered death as part of the disease process itself? Consequently, would it be justifiable to consider depression in these patients as a form of terminal illness, since without treatment, the condition would lead to death? Accordingly, could there be a place for palliative care in a small minority of suicidally depressed patients? Taking such a perspective would mean that instead of placing the focus on the prevention of deaths and prolonging of lifespan, the focus would be on making the patients comfortable as the disease progresses, maintaining their dignity, and promoting autonomy.
Suicidal depression and rights
The rationale for this is that psychiatric patients do not have the capacity to make such decisions in the acute setting, because of the direct effects of the unwell mind on their decision-making processes and cognitive faculties. While this may be true in some cases, there is limited evidence that this applies to all suicidally depressed patients in all cases.
Another argument against allowing suicidally depressed patients to decline treatment is the notion that the episode of depression can be successfully treated, and the patients can return to their normal level of functioning. However, in individuals with a previous history of severe depression, it is possible that they will relapse again at some point. In the same way, a cancer can be treated, and patients could return to their baseline level of functioning, only for the cancer to then return later in life. In both cases, these relapses are emotionally and physically exhausting and painful to get through. The difference is that a cancer patient can decline further treatment and opt for no treatment or for palliative treatment, knowing that the disease will shorten life expectancy. For suicidal depression, this is not an option. Such patients may be sectioned, admitted, and treated against their will. Suicide, which could be considered a natural endpoint of the depressive illness, is unacceptable.
Is it fair to confiscate one’s right to decline treatment, solely because that person suffers from a mental illness, as opposed to a physical one? Numerous studies have demonstrated clear structural, neurological, and neurochemical changes in suicidal depression. This is evidence that such a condition encompasses a clear physical property. Other conditions, such as dementia and chronic pain, have previously been accepted for euthanasia in certain countries. Pain is a subjective experience of nociceptive and neurochemical signaling. In the same way, depression is a subjective experience involving aberrant neurochemical signaling. The difference is that physical pain can often be localized. However, patients with suicidal depression often experience very severe and tangible pain that can be difficult to articulate and for others to understand if they have never experienced it themselves.
Like distinct forms of physical pain, suicidal depression creates a different form of pain, but it is pain, nonetheless. Is it therefore fair for suicidally depressed patients to be given lesser rights than those suffering from physical illnesses in determining their fate?
Suicidal depression and capacity
A patient is assumed to have capacity unless proven otherwise. This is often the reverse when managing psychiatric patients. However, if patients are able to fulfill all criteria required for demonstrating capacity (understanding the information, retaining, weighing up, and communicating the decision), surely they have demonstrated capacity to make their decisions, whether that is to receive or to refuse treatment.
For physical illnesses, adults with capacity are permitted to make decisions that their treating teams may not agree with, but this disagreement alone is generally insufficient to override the decisions. These patients, unlike in suicidal depression, have the right to refuse lifesaving or life-prolonging treatment.
An argument for this is that in terminal physical illnesses, death is a passive process and neither the patient nor the physician are actively causing it. However, in many palliative settings, patients can be given medications and treatment for symptomatic relief, even if these may hasten their death. The principle that makes this permissible is that the primary aim is to improve the symptoms and ensure comfort. The unintended effect includes side effects and hastened death. Similarly, in suicidal depression, one could argue that the patient should be permitted medications that may hasten or lead to death, so long as the primary aim is to improve the symptoms of the unbearable mental pain and suffering.
Let us consider an alternative scenario. What if previously suicidal patients are currently in remission from depression and make advanced directives? In their current healthy state, they assert that if, in the future, they were to relapse, they would not want any form of treatment. Instead, they wish for the disease to run its course, which may end in death through suicide.
In this case, the circumstances in which the statement was made would be entirely valid – the patients at that moment have capacity, are not under coercion, are able to articulate logical thought processes, and their reasoning would not be affected by a concurrent psychiatric pathology. Furthermore, they can demonstrate that suicide is not an impulsive decision and have considered the consequences of suicide on themselves and others. If the patients can demonstrate all the above, what would the ethical grounds be for refusing this advanced directive?
Medical ethics
Below, I consider this debate in the context of four pillars of medical ethics.
Non-maleficence
To determine whether an action is in line with non-maleficence, one must ask whether the proposed treatment will improve or resolve one’s condition. In the case of severe suicidal depression, the treatment may help patients in the short term, but what happens if or when they relapse? The treatment will likely prolong life, but also inadvertently prolong suffering. What if the patients do not wish to go through this again? The treatment regime can be profoundly taxing for the patients, the loved ones, and sometimes even for the treating team. Are we doing more harm by forcing these patients to stay alive against their will?
Beneficence
Beneficence is the moral duty to promote the action that is in the patient’s best interest. But who should determine what the patient’s best interests are if the patient and the doctor disagree? Usually, this decision is made by the treating doctor, who considers the patient’s past and present wishes, beliefs and values, and capacity assessment. Supposing that the law was not a restriction, could one’s psychiatrist ever agree on psychiatric grounds alone that it is indeed in the patient’s best interests to die?
Doctors play a central role in the duty of care. But care does not always mean active treatment. Caring encompasses physical, psychological, and spiritual welfare and includes considering an individual patient’s dignity, personal circumstances, and wishes. In certain circumstances, keeping patients with capacity alive against their wishes could be more harmful than caring.
Autonomy
Autonomy gives the patients ultimate decision-making responsibility for their own lives. It allows patients with capacity to decline treatment that is recommended by their physicians and to make decisions regarding their own death. However, in suicidally depressed patients, this autonomy is confiscated. Severely unwell patients, at high risk of committing suicide, are not permitted the autonomy to make the decision regarding their treatment, suicide, and death.
Justice
A justice-orientated and utilitarian view questions whether spending resources on these patients wastes time, resources, and expertise, and whether resources should instead be spent on patients who do want treatment.
For example, the British National Health Service holds an outstanding debt of £13.4 billion.4 The financial cost of treating mental illness in 2020/2021 was £14.31 billion.5 The NHS estimates that wider costs to national economy, including welfare benefits, housing support, social workers, community support, lost productivity at work, etc., amounts to approximately £77 billion annually.6 Many severely depressed patients are so unwell that their ability to contribute to society, financially, socially, and otherwise, is minimal. If patients with capacity genuinely want to die and society would benefit from a reduction in the pressures on health and social care services, would it not be in both their best interests to allow them to die? This way, resources could be redirected to service users who would appreciate and benefit from them the most.
A consequentialist view focuses on whether the action will benefit the patient overall; the action itself is not so relevant. According to this view, keeping suicidally depressed patients alive against their wishes would be ethical if the patients lack capacity. Keeping them safe and treating them until they are better would overall be in the patients’ best interests. However, if the patients do have capacity and wish to die, forcing them to stay alive and undergo treatment against their wishes would merely prolong their suffering and thus could be considered unethical.
When enough is enough
In suicidal treatment-resistant depression, where the patient has tried multiple treatments over time and carefully considered alternatives, when is it time to stop trying? For physical illness, patients can refuse treatment provided they can demonstrate capacity. In depression, they can refuse treatment only if they can demonstrate that they are not at serious risk to themselves or others. Most societies consider suicide as a serious risk to self and therefore unacceptable. However, if we considered suicide as a natural endpoint of the disease process, should the patient have the right to refuse treatment and allow the disease to progress to death?
The treatment regime can be a lengthy process and the repeated failures to improve can be physically and mentally exhausting and further compound the hopelessness. Treatments often have side effects, which further erode the patient’s physical and mental wellbeing. Is there a time when giving up and withdrawing active treatment is in the patient’s best interests, especially if that is what the patient wants?
Terminal diseases are incurable and likely to hasten one’s death. Severe suicidal treatment-resistant depression conforms to both conditions – it is unresponsive to treatment and has a high likelihood of precipitating premature death through suicide. Most terminal illnesses can be managed with palliative treatment. In the context of severe suicidal depression, euthanasia and assisted suicide could be considered as means of palliative care.
Palliative care involves managing the patient’s symptomatology, dignity, and comfort. Euthanasia and assisted suicide help to address all of these. Like palliative care, euthanasia and assisted suicide aim to improve symptoms of depression by alleviating pain and suffering, even if they may hasten death.
Euthanasia and assisted suicide in severe depression
Euthanasia and assisted suicide are legal in seven countries. Two countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) permit euthanasia for psychiatric illnesses. Passive euthanasia is practiced in most countries, e.g., withholding artificial life support. In suicidal depression, it could be considered that this withholding of treatment may directly lead to death by suicide.
In active euthanasia and assisted suicide, the patient is given a chemical that will directly lead to death. Euthanasia and assisted suicide allow individuals to die with dignity in a controlled and organized manner. It ends the patients’ suffering and allows them to finally find peace. The difficulties that led them to seek euthanasia/assisted suicide indicate a loss of control of the pain and suffering in life, and euthanasia allows them to regain this control and autonomy through death. It allows these individuals to properly say goodbye to their loved ones, and a chance to share their thoughts and feelings.
In contrast, suicide is often covert, clandestine, and planned in secret, and it frequently requires individuals to be dishonest with their closest loved ones. The suicide often comes as a shock to the loved ones and profound grief, questions, anger, pain, sorrow, and guilt follow. These are due to questions that have been left unanswered, thoughts that were never shared, regret that they had not done more to help, and anguish knowing that their loved one died alone, in unbearable mental agony, unable to speak to anyone about this final hurdle.
Euthanasia and assisted suicide provide a path to overcome all these issues. They encourage open conversations between the patients, their loved ones, and the treating team. They promote transparency, mutual support, and help prepare the loved ones for the death. In this way, euthanasia and assisted suicide can benefit both the patient and the loved ones.
A significant proportion of severely suicidally depressed patients will eventually go on to commit or attempt suicide. Thus, giving them the autonomy to choose euthanasia or assisted suicide could be considered a kind, fair, and compassionate course of action, as it respects their wishes, and allows them to escape their suffering and to die with dignity.
Conclusion
Depression has historically never been considered a terminal illness, but there is undeniable evidence that a significant number of deaths every year are directly caused by depression. Should we therefore shift the focus from lifesaving and life-prolonging treatment to ensuring comfort and maintaining dignity by exploring palliative options for extremely suicidally depressed patients with capacity, who are adamant on ending their lives?
Euthanasia and assisted suicide for depression pose a profound paradox when viewed through a deontological lens. According to this, the correct course of action directly corresponds to what the most “moral” action would be. The moral stance would be to help those who are suffering. But what exactly constitutes “help”? Are euthanasia and assisted suicide helping or harming? Likewise, is keeping patients with capacity alive against their wishes helping or harming? Many believe that euthanasia, assisted suicide, and suicide itself are intrinsically and morally wrong. But this poses another clear impasse. Who should be the ones to decide whether an action is moral or not? Should it be the individual? The treating physician? Or society?
Dr. Chang graduated from Imperial College London with an MBBS (medicine and surgery) and a BSc (gastroenterology and hepatology) degree.
References
1. Office for National Statistics. Suicides in England and Wales – Office for National Statistics, 2021.
2. Faulkner, A. Suicide and Deliberate Self Harm: The Fundamental Facts. Mental Health Foundation; 1997.
3. NHS. Suicide Factsheet. Southwest London and St. George’s Mental Health NHS Trust [ebook], 2022.
4. The King’s Fund. Financial debts and loans in the NHS. 2020.
5. NHS England. Mental Health Five Year Forward View Dashboard. 2018.
6. National Mental Health, Policy into Practice. The costs of mental ill health.
Two states aim to curb diet pill sales to minors
California and New York are on the cusp of going further than the Food and Drug Administration in restricting the sale of nonprescription diet pills to minors as pediatricians and public health advocates try to protect kids from extreme weight-loss gimmicks online.
A bill before Gov. Gavin Newsom would bar anyone under 18 in California from buying over-the-counter weight-loss supplements – whether online or in shops – without a prescription. A similar bill passed by New York lawmakers is on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk. Neither Democrat has indicated how he or she will act.
If both bills are signed into law, proponents hope the momentum will build to restrict diet pill sales to children in more states. Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Missouri have introduced similar bills and backers plan to continue their push next year.
Nearly 30 million people in the United States will have an eating disorder in their lifetime; 95% of them are aged between 12 and 25, according to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. The hospital added that eating disorders pose the highest risk of mortality of any mental health disorder. And it has become easier than ever for minors to get pills that are sold online or on drugstore shelves. All dietary supplements, which include those for weight loss, accounted for nearly 35% of the $63 billion over-the-counter health products industry in 2021, according to Vision Research Reports, a market research firm.
Dietary supplements, which encompass a broad range of vitamins, herbs, and minerals, are classified by the FDA as food and don’t undergo scientific and safety testing as prescription drugs and over-the-counter medicines do.
Public health advocates want to keep weight-loss products – with ads that may promise to “Drop 5 pounds a week!” and pill names like Slim Sense – away from young people, particularly girls, since some research has linked some products to eating disorders. A study in the American Journal of Public Health, which followed more than 10,000 women aged 14-36 over 15 years, found that “those who used diet pills had more than 5 times higher adjusted odds of receiving an eating disorder diagnosis from a health care provider within 1-3 years than those who did not.”
Many pills have been found tainted with banned and dangerous ingredients that may cause cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and other ailments. For example, the FDA advised the public to avoid Slim Sense by Dr. Reade because it contains lorcaserin, which has been found to cause psychiatric disturbances and impairments in attention or memory. The FDA ordered it discontinued and the company couldn’t be reached for comment.
“Unscrupulous manufacturers are willing to take risks with consumers’ health – and they are lacing their products with illegal pharmaceuticals, banned pharmaceuticals, steroids, excessive stimulants, even experimental stimulants,” said S. Bryn Austin, ScD, founding director of the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders, or STRIPED, which supports the restrictions. “Consumers have no idea that this is what’s in these types of products.”
STRIPED is a public health initiative based at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and Boston Children’s Hospital.
An industry trade group, the Natural Products Association, disputes that diet pills cause eating disorders, citing the lack of consumer complaints to the FDA of adverse events from their members’ products. “According to FDA data, there is no association between the two,” said Kyle Turk, the association’s director of government affairs.
The association contends that its members adhere to safe manufacturing processes, random product testing, and appropriate marketing guidelines. Representatives also worry that if minors can’t buy supplements over the counter, they may buy them from “crooks” on the black market and undermine the integrity of the industry. Under the bills, minors purchasing weight-loss products must show identification along with a prescription.
Not all business groups oppose the ban. The American Herbal Products Association, a trade group representing dietary supplement manufacturers and retailers, dropped its opposition to California’s bill once it was amended to remove ingredient categories that are found in non-diet supplements and vitamins, according to Robert Marriott, director of regulatory affairs.
Children’s advocates have found worrisome trends among young people who envision their ideal body type based on what they see on social media. According to a study commissioned by Fairplay, a nonprofit that seeks to stop harmful marketing practices targeting children, kids as young as 9 were found to be following three or more eating disorder accounts on Instagram, while the median age was 19. The authors called it a “pro–eating disorder bubble.”
Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, said the report lacks nuance, such as recognizing the human need to share life’s difficult moments. The company argues that blanket censorship isn’t the answer. “Experts and safety organizations have told us it’s important to strike a balance and allow people to share their personal stories while removing any content that encourages or promotes eating disorders,” Liza Crenshaw, a Meta spokesperson, said in an email.
Jason Nagata, MD, a pediatrician who cares for children and young adults with life-threatening eating disorders, believes that easy access to diet pills contributes to his patients’ conditions at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. That was the case for one of his patients, an emaciated 11-year-old girl.
“She had basically entered a starvation state because she was not getting enough nutrition,” said Dr. Nagata, who provided supporting testimony for the California bill. “She was taking these pills and using other kinds of extreme behaviors to lose weight.”
Dr. Nagata said the number of patients he sees with eating disorders has tripled since the pandemic began. They are desperate to get diet pills, some with modest results. “We’ve had patients who have been so dependent on these products that they will be hospitalized and they’re still ordering these products on Amazon,” he said.
Public health advocates turned to state legislatures in response to the federal government’s limited authority to regulate diet pills. Under a 1994 federal law known as the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, the FDA “cannot step in until after there is a clear issue of harm to consumers,” said Dr. Austin.
No match for the supplement industry’s heavy lobbying on Capitol Hill, public health advocates shifted to a state-by-state approach.
There is, however, a push for the FDA to improve oversight of what goes into diet pills. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in April introduced a bill that would require dietary supplement manufacturers to register their products – along with the ingredients – with the regulator.
Proponents say the change is needed because manufacturers have been known to include dangerous ingredients. C. Michael White, PharmD, of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, found 35% of tainted health products came from weight-loss supplements in a review of a health fraud database.
A few ingredients have been banned, including sibutramine, a stimulant. “It was a very commonly used weight-loss supplement that ended up being removed from the U.S. market because of its elevated risk of causing things like heart attacks, strokes, and arrhythmias,” Dr. White said.
Another ingredient was phenolphthalein, which was used in laxatives until it was identified as a suspected carcinogen and banned in 1999. “To think,” he said, “that that product would still be on the U.S. market is just unconscionable.”
This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
California and New York are on the cusp of going further than the Food and Drug Administration in restricting the sale of nonprescription diet pills to minors as pediatricians and public health advocates try to protect kids from extreme weight-loss gimmicks online.
A bill before Gov. Gavin Newsom would bar anyone under 18 in California from buying over-the-counter weight-loss supplements – whether online or in shops – without a prescription. A similar bill passed by New York lawmakers is on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk. Neither Democrat has indicated how he or she will act.
If both bills are signed into law, proponents hope the momentum will build to restrict diet pill sales to children in more states. Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Missouri have introduced similar bills and backers plan to continue their push next year.
Nearly 30 million people in the United States will have an eating disorder in their lifetime; 95% of them are aged between 12 and 25, according to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. The hospital added that eating disorders pose the highest risk of mortality of any mental health disorder. And it has become easier than ever for minors to get pills that are sold online or on drugstore shelves. All dietary supplements, which include those for weight loss, accounted for nearly 35% of the $63 billion over-the-counter health products industry in 2021, according to Vision Research Reports, a market research firm.
Dietary supplements, which encompass a broad range of vitamins, herbs, and minerals, are classified by the FDA as food and don’t undergo scientific and safety testing as prescription drugs and over-the-counter medicines do.
Public health advocates want to keep weight-loss products – with ads that may promise to “Drop 5 pounds a week!” and pill names like Slim Sense – away from young people, particularly girls, since some research has linked some products to eating disorders. A study in the American Journal of Public Health, which followed more than 10,000 women aged 14-36 over 15 years, found that “those who used diet pills had more than 5 times higher adjusted odds of receiving an eating disorder diagnosis from a health care provider within 1-3 years than those who did not.”
Many pills have been found tainted with banned and dangerous ingredients that may cause cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and other ailments. For example, the FDA advised the public to avoid Slim Sense by Dr. Reade because it contains lorcaserin, which has been found to cause psychiatric disturbances and impairments in attention or memory. The FDA ordered it discontinued and the company couldn’t be reached for comment.
“Unscrupulous manufacturers are willing to take risks with consumers’ health – and they are lacing their products with illegal pharmaceuticals, banned pharmaceuticals, steroids, excessive stimulants, even experimental stimulants,” said S. Bryn Austin, ScD, founding director of the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders, or STRIPED, which supports the restrictions. “Consumers have no idea that this is what’s in these types of products.”
STRIPED is a public health initiative based at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and Boston Children’s Hospital.
An industry trade group, the Natural Products Association, disputes that diet pills cause eating disorders, citing the lack of consumer complaints to the FDA of adverse events from their members’ products. “According to FDA data, there is no association between the two,” said Kyle Turk, the association’s director of government affairs.
The association contends that its members adhere to safe manufacturing processes, random product testing, and appropriate marketing guidelines. Representatives also worry that if minors can’t buy supplements over the counter, they may buy them from “crooks” on the black market and undermine the integrity of the industry. Under the bills, minors purchasing weight-loss products must show identification along with a prescription.
Not all business groups oppose the ban. The American Herbal Products Association, a trade group representing dietary supplement manufacturers and retailers, dropped its opposition to California’s bill once it was amended to remove ingredient categories that are found in non-diet supplements and vitamins, according to Robert Marriott, director of regulatory affairs.
Children’s advocates have found worrisome trends among young people who envision their ideal body type based on what they see on social media. According to a study commissioned by Fairplay, a nonprofit that seeks to stop harmful marketing practices targeting children, kids as young as 9 were found to be following three or more eating disorder accounts on Instagram, while the median age was 19. The authors called it a “pro–eating disorder bubble.”
Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, said the report lacks nuance, such as recognizing the human need to share life’s difficult moments. The company argues that blanket censorship isn’t the answer. “Experts and safety organizations have told us it’s important to strike a balance and allow people to share their personal stories while removing any content that encourages or promotes eating disorders,” Liza Crenshaw, a Meta spokesperson, said in an email.
Jason Nagata, MD, a pediatrician who cares for children and young adults with life-threatening eating disorders, believes that easy access to diet pills contributes to his patients’ conditions at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. That was the case for one of his patients, an emaciated 11-year-old girl.
“She had basically entered a starvation state because she was not getting enough nutrition,” said Dr. Nagata, who provided supporting testimony for the California bill. “She was taking these pills and using other kinds of extreme behaviors to lose weight.”
Dr. Nagata said the number of patients he sees with eating disorders has tripled since the pandemic began. They are desperate to get diet pills, some with modest results. “We’ve had patients who have been so dependent on these products that they will be hospitalized and they’re still ordering these products on Amazon,” he said.
Public health advocates turned to state legislatures in response to the federal government’s limited authority to regulate diet pills. Under a 1994 federal law known as the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, the FDA “cannot step in until after there is a clear issue of harm to consumers,” said Dr. Austin.
No match for the supplement industry’s heavy lobbying on Capitol Hill, public health advocates shifted to a state-by-state approach.
There is, however, a push for the FDA to improve oversight of what goes into diet pills. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in April introduced a bill that would require dietary supplement manufacturers to register their products – along with the ingredients – with the regulator.
Proponents say the change is needed because manufacturers have been known to include dangerous ingredients. C. Michael White, PharmD, of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, found 35% of tainted health products came from weight-loss supplements in a review of a health fraud database.
A few ingredients have been banned, including sibutramine, a stimulant. “It was a very commonly used weight-loss supplement that ended up being removed from the U.S. market because of its elevated risk of causing things like heart attacks, strokes, and arrhythmias,” Dr. White said.
Another ingredient was phenolphthalein, which was used in laxatives until it was identified as a suspected carcinogen and banned in 1999. “To think,” he said, “that that product would still be on the U.S. market is just unconscionable.”
This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
California and New York are on the cusp of going further than the Food and Drug Administration in restricting the sale of nonprescription diet pills to minors as pediatricians and public health advocates try to protect kids from extreme weight-loss gimmicks online.
A bill before Gov. Gavin Newsom would bar anyone under 18 in California from buying over-the-counter weight-loss supplements – whether online or in shops – without a prescription. A similar bill passed by New York lawmakers is on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk. Neither Democrat has indicated how he or she will act.
If both bills are signed into law, proponents hope the momentum will build to restrict diet pill sales to children in more states. Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Missouri have introduced similar bills and backers plan to continue their push next year.
Nearly 30 million people in the United States will have an eating disorder in their lifetime; 95% of them are aged between 12 and 25, according to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. The hospital added that eating disorders pose the highest risk of mortality of any mental health disorder. And it has become easier than ever for minors to get pills that are sold online or on drugstore shelves. All dietary supplements, which include those for weight loss, accounted for nearly 35% of the $63 billion over-the-counter health products industry in 2021, according to Vision Research Reports, a market research firm.
Dietary supplements, which encompass a broad range of vitamins, herbs, and minerals, are classified by the FDA as food and don’t undergo scientific and safety testing as prescription drugs and over-the-counter medicines do.
Public health advocates want to keep weight-loss products – with ads that may promise to “Drop 5 pounds a week!” and pill names like Slim Sense – away from young people, particularly girls, since some research has linked some products to eating disorders. A study in the American Journal of Public Health, which followed more than 10,000 women aged 14-36 over 15 years, found that “those who used diet pills had more than 5 times higher adjusted odds of receiving an eating disorder diagnosis from a health care provider within 1-3 years than those who did not.”
Many pills have been found tainted with banned and dangerous ingredients that may cause cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and other ailments. For example, the FDA advised the public to avoid Slim Sense by Dr. Reade because it contains lorcaserin, which has been found to cause psychiatric disturbances and impairments in attention or memory. The FDA ordered it discontinued and the company couldn’t be reached for comment.
“Unscrupulous manufacturers are willing to take risks with consumers’ health – and they are lacing their products with illegal pharmaceuticals, banned pharmaceuticals, steroids, excessive stimulants, even experimental stimulants,” said S. Bryn Austin, ScD, founding director of the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders, or STRIPED, which supports the restrictions. “Consumers have no idea that this is what’s in these types of products.”
STRIPED is a public health initiative based at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and Boston Children’s Hospital.
An industry trade group, the Natural Products Association, disputes that diet pills cause eating disorders, citing the lack of consumer complaints to the FDA of adverse events from their members’ products. “According to FDA data, there is no association between the two,” said Kyle Turk, the association’s director of government affairs.
The association contends that its members adhere to safe manufacturing processes, random product testing, and appropriate marketing guidelines. Representatives also worry that if minors can’t buy supplements over the counter, they may buy them from “crooks” on the black market and undermine the integrity of the industry. Under the bills, minors purchasing weight-loss products must show identification along with a prescription.
Not all business groups oppose the ban. The American Herbal Products Association, a trade group representing dietary supplement manufacturers and retailers, dropped its opposition to California’s bill once it was amended to remove ingredient categories that are found in non-diet supplements and vitamins, according to Robert Marriott, director of regulatory affairs.
Children’s advocates have found worrisome trends among young people who envision their ideal body type based on what they see on social media. According to a study commissioned by Fairplay, a nonprofit that seeks to stop harmful marketing practices targeting children, kids as young as 9 were found to be following three or more eating disorder accounts on Instagram, while the median age was 19. The authors called it a “pro–eating disorder bubble.”
Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, said the report lacks nuance, such as recognizing the human need to share life’s difficult moments. The company argues that blanket censorship isn’t the answer. “Experts and safety organizations have told us it’s important to strike a balance and allow people to share their personal stories while removing any content that encourages or promotes eating disorders,” Liza Crenshaw, a Meta spokesperson, said in an email.
Jason Nagata, MD, a pediatrician who cares for children and young adults with life-threatening eating disorders, believes that easy access to diet pills contributes to his patients’ conditions at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. That was the case for one of his patients, an emaciated 11-year-old girl.
“She had basically entered a starvation state because she was not getting enough nutrition,” said Dr. Nagata, who provided supporting testimony for the California bill. “She was taking these pills and using other kinds of extreme behaviors to lose weight.”
Dr. Nagata said the number of patients he sees with eating disorders has tripled since the pandemic began. They are desperate to get diet pills, some with modest results. “We’ve had patients who have been so dependent on these products that they will be hospitalized and they’re still ordering these products on Amazon,” he said.
Public health advocates turned to state legislatures in response to the federal government’s limited authority to regulate diet pills. Under a 1994 federal law known as the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, the FDA “cannot step in until after there is a clear issue of harm to consumers,” said Dr. Austin.
No match for the supplement industry’s heavy lobbying on Capitol Hill, public health advocates shifted to a state-by-state approach.
There is, however, a push for the FDA to improve oversight of what goes into diet pills. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in April introduced a bill that would require dietary supplement manufacturers to register their products – along with the ingredients – with the regulator.
Proponents say the change is needed because manufacturers have been known to include dangerous ingredients. C. Michael White, PharmD, of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, found 35% of tainted health products came from weight-loss supplements in a review of a health fraud database.
A few ingredients have been banned, including sibutramine, a stimulant. “It was a very commonly used weight-loss supplement that ended up being removed from the U.S. market because of its elevated risk of causing things like heart attacks, strokes, and arrhythmias,” Dr. White said.
Another ingredient was phenolphthalein, which was used in laxatives until it was identified as a suspected carcinogen and banned in 1999. “To think,” he said, “that that product would still be on the U.S. market is just unconscionable.”
This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
Mental health in America: ‘The kids are not alright’
A new report shines a light on the toll the pandemic and other stressors have taken on the mental health of U.S. children and adolescents over the last 6 years.
The report shows a dramatic increase in use of acute care services for depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions, especially among teens and preteens.
The report – The Kids Are Not Alright: Pediatric Mental Health Care Utilization from 2016-2021 – is the work of researchers at the Clarify Health Institute, the research arm of Clarify Health.
The results are “deeply concerning” and should “spark a conversation” around the need to improve access, utilization, and quality of pediatric behavioral health services, Niall Brennan, chief analytics and privacy officer for the Clarify Health Institute, told this news organization.
‘Startling’ trends
Leveraging an observational, national sample of insurance claims from more than 20 million children aged 1-19 years annually, the researchers observed several disturbing trends in mental health care.
From 2016 to 2021, inpatient (IP) admissions rose 61% (from 30 to 48 visits annually per 1,000) and emergency department visits rose 20% (from 55 to 66 visits annually per 1,000).
Mental health IP admissions ranged from a low of 27% in the West North Central region to a high of 137% in the Middle Atlantic region.
There were substantial increases from 2016 to 2021 in mental health IP admissions among children of all age groups, but particularly among adolescents 12 to 15 years old, increasing 84% among girls and 83% among boys in this age group.
There was also a sharp increase in mental health ED visits among girls and boys aged 12-15 years, increasing 20% overall during the study period.
Mental health IP use grew faster from 2016 to 2021 among children with commercial insurance than among those with Medicaid (103% vs. 40%).
In contrast, mental health–specific ED visits declined 10% among children with commercial insurance and increased by 20% among those with Medicaid.
ED utilization rates in 2021 were nearly twice as high in the Medicaid population, compared with those for children with commercial insurance.
These are “startling” increases, Mr. Brennan said in an interview.
These trends “reinforce health care leaders’ responsibility to address children’s mental health, especially when considering that half of all mental health conditions onset during adolescence and carry into adulthood,” Jean Drouin, MD, Clarify Health’s chief executive office and cofounder, adds in a news release.
“With a growing consensus that mental, behavioral, and physical health intersect, this research report aims to spark a conversation about the overall wellbeing of America’s next generation,” Dr. Drouin says.
Concern for the future
Commenting on the new report, Anish Dube, MD, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents, and their Families, said the findings are “concerning, though unsurprising.”
“They confirm what those of us in clinical practice have experienced in the last several years. The need for mental health services continues to rise every year, while access to adequate help remains lacking,” Dr. Dube said.
“With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about the effects of climate change, global political uncertainty, and a rapidly changing employment landscape, young people in particular are vulnerable to worries about their future and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness,” he added.
Dr. Dube said there is no one right solution, and addressing this problem must consider individual and local factors.
However, some of the broader interventions needed to tackle the problem include increasing access to care by enforcing mental health parity and increasing the number of trained and qualified mental health professionals, such as child and adolescent psychiatrists, who can assess and treat these conditions in young people before they become major crises and lead to acute interventions like inpatient hospitalization.
“Public health interventions aimed at schools and families in raising awareness of mental health and well-being, and simple, cost-effective interventions to practice mental wellness will also help reduce the burden of mental illness in young people,” Dr. Dube added.
“The APA continues to fight for mental health parity enforcement and for meaningful access to mental health care for children, adolescents, and their families,” Dr. Dube said.
This research was conducted by the Clarify Health Institute. Mr. Brennan and Dr. Dube report no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
A new report shines a light on the toll the pandemic and other stressors have taken on the mental health of U.S. children and adolescents over the last 6 years.
The report shows a dramatic increase in use of acute care services for depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions, especially among teens and preteens.
The report – The Kids Are Not Alright: Pediatric Mental Health Care Utilization from 2016-2021 – is the work of researchers at the Clarify Health Institute, the research arm of Clarify Health.
The results are “deeply concerning” and should “spark a conversation” around the need to improve access, utilization, and quality of pediatric behavioral health services, Niall Brennan, chief analytics and privacy officer for the Clarify Health Institute, told this news organization.
‘Startling’ trends
Leveraging an observational, national sample of insurance claims from more than 20 million children aged 1-19 years annually, the researchers observed several disturbing trends in mental health care.
From 2016 to 2021, inpatient (IP) admissions rose 61% (from 30 to 48 visits annually per 1,000) and emergency department visits rose 20% (from 55 to 66 visits annually per 1,000).
Mental health IP admissions ranged from a low of 27% in the West North Central region to a high of 137% in the Middle Atlantic region.
There were substantial increases from 2016 to 2021 in mental health IP admissions among children of all age groups, but particularly among adolescents 12 to 15 years old, increasing 84% among girls and 83% among boys in this age group.
There was also a sharp increase in mental health ED visits among girls and boys aged 12-15 years, increasing 20% overall during the study period.
Mental health IP use grew faster from 2016 to 2021 among children with commercial insurance than among those with Medicaid (103% vs. 40%).
In contrast, mental health–specific ED visits declined 10% among children with commercial insurance and increased by 20% among those with Medicaid.
ED utilization rates in 2021 were nearly twice as high in the Medicaid population, compared with those for children with commercial insurance.
These are “startling” increases, Mr. Brennan said in an interview.
These trends “reinforce health care leaders’ responsibility to address children’s mental health, especially when considering that half of all mental health conditions onset during adolescence and carry into adulthood,” Jean Drouin, MD, Clarify Health’s chief executive office and cofounder, adds in a news release.
“With a growing consensus that mental, behavioral, and physical health intersect, this research report aims to spark a conversation about the overall wellbeing of America’s next generation,” Dr. Drouin says.
Concern for the future
Commenting on the new report, Anish Dube, MD, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents, and their Families, said the findings are “concerning, though unsurprising.”
“They confirm what those of us in clinical practice have experienced in the last several years. The need for mental health services continues to rise every year, while access to adequate help remains lacking,” Dr. Dube said.
“With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about the effects of climate change, global political uncertainty, and a rapidly changing employment landscape, young people in particular are vulnerable to worries about their future and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness,” he added.
Dr. Dube said there is no one right solution, and addressing this problem must consider individual and local factors.
However, some of the broader interventions needed to tackle the problem include increasing access to care by enforcing mental health parity and increasing the number of trained and qualified mental health professionals, such as child and adolescent psychiatrists, who can assess and treat these conditions in young people before they become major crises and lead to acute interventions like inpatient hospitalization.
“Public health interventions aimed at schools and families in raising awareness of mental health and well-being, and simple, cost-effective interventions to practice mental wellness will also help reduce the burden of mental illness in young people,” Dr. Dube added.
“The APA continues to fight for mental health parity enforcement and for meaningful access to mental health care for children, adolescents, and their families,” Dr. Dube said.
This research was conducted by the Clarify Health Institute. Mr. Brennan and Dr. Dube report no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
A new report shines a light on the toll the pandemic and other stressors have taken on the mental health of U.S. children and adolescents over the last 6 years.
The report shows a dramatic increase in use of acute care services for depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions, especially among teens and preteens.
The report – The Kids Are Not Alright: Pediatric Mental Health Care Utilization from 2016-2021 – is the work of researchers at the Clarify Health Institute, the research arm of Clarify Health.
The results are “deeply concerning” and should “spark a conversation” around the need to improve access, utilization, and quality of pediatric behavioral health services, Niall Brennan, chief analytics and privacy officer for the Clarify Health Institute, told this news organization.
‘Startling’ trends
Leveraging an observational, national sample of insurance claims from more than 20 million children aged 1-19 years annually, the researchers observed several disturbing trends in mental health care.
From 2016 to 2021, inpatient (IP) admissions rose 61% (from 30 to 48 visits annually per 1,000) and emergency department visits rose 20% (from 55 to 66 visits annually per 1,000).
Mental health IP admissions ranged from a low of 27% in the West North Central region to a high of 137% in the Middle Atlantic region.
There were substantial increases from 2016 to 2021 in mental health IP admissions among children of all age groups, but particularly among adolescents 12 to 15 years old, increasing 84% among girls and 83% among boys in this age group.
There was also a sharp increase in mental health ED visits among girls and boys aged 12-15 years, increasing 20% overall during the study period.
Mental health IP use grew faster from 2016 to 2021 among children with commercial insurance than among those with Medicaid (103% vs. 40%).
In contrast, mental health–specific ED visits declined 10% among children with commercial insurance and increased by 20% among those with Medicaid.
ED utilization rates in 2021 were nearly twice as high in the Medicaid population, compared with those for children with commercial insurance.
These are “startling” increases, Mr. Brennan said in an interview.
These trends “reinforce health care leaders’ responsibility to address children’s mental health, especially when considering that half of all mental health conditions onset during adolescence and carry into adulthood,” Jean Drouin, MD, Clarify Health’s chief executive office and cofounder, adds in a news release.
“With a growing consensus that mental, behavioral, and physical health intersect, this research report aims to spark a conversation about the overall wellbeing of America’s next generation,” Dr. Drouin says.
Concern for the future
Commenting on the new report, Anish Dube, MD, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents, and their Families, said the findings are “concerning, though unsurprising.”
“They confirm what those of us in clinical practice have experienced in the last several years. The need for mental health services continues to rise every year, while access to adequate help remains lacking,” Dr. Dube said.
“With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about the effects of climate change, global political uncertainty, and a rapidly changing employment landscape, young people in particular are vulnerable to worries about their future and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness,” he added.
Dr. Dube said there is no one right solution, and addressing this problem must consider individual and local factors.
However, some of the broader interventions needed to tackle the problem include increasing access to care by enforcing mental health parity and increasing the number of trained and qualified mental health professionals, such as child and adolescent psychiatrists, who can assess and treat these conditions in young people before they become major crises and lead to acute interventions like inpatient hospitalization.
“Public health interventions aimed at schools and families in raising awareness of mental health and well-being, and simple, cost-effective interventions to practice mental wellness will also help reduce the burden of mental illness in young people,” Dr. Dube added.
“The APA continues to fight for mental health parity enforcement and for meaningful access to mental health care for children, adolescents, and their families,” Dr. Dube said.
This research was conducted by the Clarify Health Institute. Mr. Brennan and Dr. Dube report no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
Vitamins or cocoa: Which preserves cognition?
Unexpected results from a phase 3 trial exploring the effect of multivitamins and cognition have now been published.
Originally presented last November at the 14th Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD) conference, this is the first large-scale, long-term randomized controlled trial to examine the effects of cocoa extract and multivitamins on global cognition. The trial’s primary focus was on cocoa extract, which earlier studies suggest may preserve cognitive function. Analyzing the effect of multivitamins was a secondary outcome.
Showing vitamins, but not cocoa, were beneficial is the exact opposite of what researchers expected. Still, the results offer an interesting new direction for future study, lead investigator Laura D. Baker, PhD, professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C., said in an interview.
“This study made us take notice of a pathway for possible cognitive protection,” Dr. Baker said. “Without this study, we would never have looked down that road.”
The full results were published online in Alzheimer’s and Dementia.
Unexpected effect
The COSMOS-Mind study is a substudy to a larger parent trial called COSMOS. It investigated the effects of cocoa extract and a standard multivitamin-mineral on cardiovascular and cancer outcomes in more than 21,000 older participants.
In COSMOS-Mind, researchers tested whether daily intake of cocoa extract vs. placebo and a multivitamin-mineral vs. placebo improved cognition in older adults.
More than 2,200 participants aged 65 and older were enrolled and followed for 3 years. They completed tests over the telephone at baseline and annually to evaluate memory and other cognitive abilities.
Results showed cocoa extract had no effect on global cognition compared with placebo (mean z-score, 0.03; P = .28). Daily multivitamin use, however, did show significant benefits on global cognition vs. placebo (mean z, 0.07, P = .007).
The beneficial effect was most pronounced in participants with a history of cardiovascular disease (no history 0.06 vs. history 0.14; P = .01).
Researchers found similar protective effects for memory and executive function.
Dr. Baker suggested one possible explanation for the positive effects of multivitamins may be the boost in micronutrients and essential minerals they provided.
“With nutrient-deficient diets plus a high prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other medical comorbidities that we know impact the bioavailability of these nutrients, we are possibly dealing with older adults who are at below optimum in terms of their essential micronutrients and minerals,” she said.
“Even suboptimum levels of micronutrients and essential minerals can have significant consequences for brain health,” she added.
More research needed
Intriguing as the results may be, more work is needed before the findings could affect nutritional guidance, according to Maria C. Carrillo, PhD, chief science officer for the Alzheimer’s Association.
“While the Alzheimer’s Association is encouraged by these results, we are not ready to recommend widespread use of a multivitamin supplement to reduce risk of cognitive decline in older adults,” Dr. Carrillo said in a statement.
“For now, and until there is more data, people should talk with their health care providers about the benefits and risks of all dietary supplements, including multivitamins,” she added.
Dr. Baker agreed, noting that the study was not designed to measure multivitamin use as a primary outcome. In addition, nearly 90% of the participants were non-Hispanic White, which is not representative of the overall population demographics.
The investigators are now designing another, larger trial that would include a more diverse participant pool. It will be aimed specifically at learning more about how and why multivitamins seem to offer a protective effect on cognition, Dr. Baker noted.
The study was funded by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Baker and Dr. Carrillo report no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
Unexpected results from a phase 3 trial exploring the effect of multivitamins and cognition have now been published.
Originally presented last November at the 14th Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD) conference, this is the first large-scale, long-term randomized controlled trial to examine the effects of cocoa extract and multivitamins on global cognition. The trial’s primary focus was on cocoa extract, which earlier studies suggest may preserve cognitive function. Analyzing the effect of multivitamins was a secondary outcome.
Showing vitamins, but not cocoa, were beneficial is the exact opposite of what researchers expected. Still, the results offer an interesting new direction for future study, lead investigator Laura D. Baker, PhD, professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C., said in an interview.
“This study made us take notice of a pathway for possible cognitive protection,” Dr. Baker said. “Without this study, we would never have looked down that road.”
The full results were published online in Alzheimer’s and Dementia.
Unexpected effect
The COSMOS-Mind study is a substudy to a larger parent trial called COSMOS. It investigated the effects of cocoa extract and a standard multivitamin-mineral on cardiovascular and cancer outcomes in more than 21,000 older participants.
In COSMOS-Mind, researchers tested whether daily intake of cocoa extract vs. placebo and a multivitamin-mineral vs. placebo improved cognition in older adults.
More than 2,200 participants aged 65 and older were enrolled and followed for 3 years. They completed tests over the telephone at baseline and annually to evaluate memory and other cognitive abilities.
Results showed cocoa extract had no effect on global cognition compared with placebo (mean z-score, 0.03; P = .28). Daily multivitamin use, however, did show significant benefits on global cognition vs. placebo (mean z, 0.07, P = .007).
The beneficial effect was most pronounced in participants with a history of cardiovascular disease (no history 0.06 vs. history 0.14; P = .01).
Researchers found similar protective effects for memory and executive function.
Dr. Baker suggested one possible explanation for the positive effects of multivitamins may be the boost in micronutrients and essential minerals they provided.
“With nutrient-deficient diets plus a high prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other medical comorbidities that we know impact the bioavailability of these nutrients, we are possibly dealing with older adults who are at below optimum in terms of their essential micronutrients and minerals,” she said.
“Even suboptimum levels of micronutrients and essential minerals can have significant consequences for brain health,” she added.
More research needed
Intriguing as the results may be, more work is needed before the findings could affect nutritional guidance, according to Maria C. Carrillo, PhD, chief science officer for the Alzheimer’s Association.
“While the Alzheimer’s Association is encouraged by these results, we are not ready to recommend widespread use of a multivitamin supplement to reduce risk of cognitive decline in older adults,” Dr. Carrillo said in a statement.
“For now, and until there is more data, people should talk with their health care providers about the benefits and risks of all dietary supplements, including multivitamins,” she added.
Dr. Baker agreed, noting that the study was not designed to measure multivitamin use as a primary outcome. In addition, nearly 90% of the participants were non-Hispanic White, which is not representative of the overall population demographics.
The investigators are now designing another, larger trial that would include a more diverse participant pool. It will be aimed specifically at learning more about how and why multivitamins seem to offer a protective effect on cognition, Dr. Baker noted.
The study was funded by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Baker and Dr. Carrillo report no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
Unexpected results from a phase 3 trial exploring the effect of multivitamins and cognition have now been published.
Originally presented last November at the 14th Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD) conference, this is the first large-scale, long-term randomized controlled trial to examine the effects of cocoa extract and multivitamins on global cognition. The trial’s primary focus was on cocoa extract, which earlier studies suggest may preserve cognitive function. Analyzing the effect of multivitamins was a secondary outcome.
Showing vitamins, but not cocoa, were beneficial is the exact opposite of what researchers expected. Still, the results offer an interesting new direction for future study, lead investigator Laura D. Baker, PhD, professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C., said in an interview.
“This study made us take notice of a pathway for possible cognitive protection,” Dr. Baker said. “Without this study, we would never have looked down that road.”
The full results were published online in Alzheimer’s and Dementia.
Unexpected effect
The COSMOS-Mind study is a substudy to a larger parent trial called COSMOS. It investigated the effects of cocoa extract and a standard multivitamin-mineral on cardiovascular and cancer outcomes in more than 21,000 older participants.
In COSMOS-Mind, researchers tested whether daily intake of cocoa extract vs. placebo and a multivitamin-mineral vs. placebo improved cognition in older adults.
More than 2,200 participants aged 65 and older were enrolled and followed for 3 years. They completed tests over the telephone at baseline and annually to evaluate memory and other cognitive abilities.
Results showed cocoa extract had no effect on global cognition compared with placebo (mean z-score, 0.03; P = .28). Daily multivitamin use, however, did show significant benefits on global cognition vs. placebo (mean z, 0.07, P = .007).
The beneficial effect was most pronounced in participants with a history of cardiovascular disease (no history 0.06 vs. history 0.14; P = .01).
Researchers found similar protective effects for memory and executive function.
Dr. Baker suggested one possible explanation for the positive effects of multivitamins may be the boost in micronutrients and essential minerals they provided.
“With nutrient-deficient diets plus a high prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other medical comorbidities that we know impact the bioavailability of these nutrients, we are possibly dealing with older adults who are at below optimum in terms of their essential micronutrients and minerals,” she said.
“Even suboptimum levels of micronutrients and essential minerals can have significant consequences for brain health,” she added.
More research needed
Intriguing as the results may be, more work is needed before the findings could affect nutritional guidance, according to Maria C. Carrillo, PhD, chief science officer for the Alzheimer’s Association.
“While the Alzheimer’s Association is encouraged by these results, we are not ready to recommend widespread use of a multivitamin supplement to reduce risk of cognitive decline in older adults,” Dr. Carrillo said in a statement.
“For now, and until there is more data, people should talk with their health care providers about the benefits and risks of all dietary supplements, including multivitamins,” she added.
Dr. Baker agreed, noting that the study was not designed to measure multivitamin use as a primary outcome. In addition, nearly 90% of the participants were non-Hispanic White, which is not representative of the overall population demographics.
The investigators are now designing another, larger trial that would include a more diverse participant pool. It will be aimed specifically at learning more about how and why multivitamins seem to offer a protective effect on cognition, Dr. Baker noted.
The study was funded by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Baker and Dr. Carrillo report no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.
FROM ALZHEIMER’S AND DEMENTIA