What's killing psychiatry?

Managed-care companies say they're improving the way psychiatrists do business. And psychiatric drugs have never been more effective. Meanwhile, psychiatry itself is becoming extinct

by Lisa Birk

YOUR MOTHER DIED nine months ago, and you're sad. Really sad. You sleep 14 hours a day, wake up tired. Drink a couple beers before work. It takes three times as long to do the office billing. Your colleagues make comments. You go home, call your managed care company for a referral.

A high school graduate answers, asks your zip code and your problem. You stutter -- this is private stuff, and she's typing it into a computer. You mention your mother died. You don't mention the beer.

"Depression. Eight appointments," she says, and tells you three names to call in your zip code.

The first appointment runs long, 20 minutes. The psychiatrist asks a dozen questions. Eating regularly? Sleeping well? Concentrating? Drug allergies? He doesn't ask about drinking, so you don't mention it. Hey, you can stop anytime you want.

Fifteen minutes later you walk out with a prescription for Prozac. Call if you have diarrhea.

At the next appointment, the doctor asks what "outcomes" you'd like. Better concentration, less sleeping, you say. Together, you decide that meeting those goals will mean success, and that's when you'll stop therapy.

The next six appointments go pretty much the same, except you feel a little better. The doctor asks the same questions; you answer. You never talk about your mom. Or the drinking. There isn't time, and anyway, you don't really know the guy. Are you gonna tell him your most intimate secrets? Besides, he keeps looking at the clock.

The Prozac kicks in after a month or so. Your sleep pattern normalizes, you're quicker at work, and life doesn't seem so bleak. Success, right?

After the last appointment, you feel odd, empty maybe. You can't quite figure out why. Sure, you are quantifiably better (except for the drinking), but you don't feel quite satisfied, quite . . . human. Pills did something to your synapses -- allowed them to absorb more joy, alleviated some symptoms -- but no one has listened. No one has heard about you. Was that therapy? You shrug it off, pick up your last prescription and head home. Maybe have a couple of beers, watch Jeopardy.

Another success for modern psychiatry.

REMEMBER THE archetypal Woody Allen psychiatrist? The one bathed in soft light, head cocked, listening to Woody's story for 50 minutes every week? If that archetype were an animal, he'd be on the endangered list.

The premise of traditional psychiatry was that the individual mattered. The doctor's insight and empathy mattered, and the patient's story and feelings mattered. Those values were reflected in the practice of psychiatry itself. Referrals were word-of-mouth, based on a knowledge of patient and therapist. Confidentiality was the basis of the relationship. Treatment sometimes included drugs, but always included talk therapy, in which the patient had the psychiatrist's full attention. The length of treatment was a private matter between doctor and patient.

The premise of the new psychiatry is that profit matters. Profit depends on efficiency, and efficiency is based on statistics. Same as any other industry. How long does it take the average worker to bolt a fender onto a car? A worker who takes longer knows he has to speed up or lose his job.

The principles of managed heath care, which now govern the psychiatric treatment of all but the very rich, apply the same efficiency standards to therapy. How long does it take the average doctor to "fix" the average patient's depression? How can efficiency be improved? The result of this approach is that every element of therapy is becoming mechanized; at worst, psychiatry has become a matter of referrals by zip code, over-reliance on medication, and treatment whose duration is determined by statistics-wielding bureaucrats.

What happens when a profession charged with the most delicate of tasks -- treating the human psyche -- is driven by the most mechanistic sciences -- statistics, chemistry, economics? This story is about who benefits and who loses under this new system of mental health care, and what is happening to psychiatry itself.

THE IDEA of managed care evolved in response to a crisis: in the mental health field, as in all health care fields, costs skyrocketed in the '70s and '80s. Doctors could charge whatever they wanted, and did. Patients could receive services indefinitely, or as long as their insurance company paid the bills. Psychiatrists had a financial incentive to prolong treatment.

Managed care reversed that. The financial benefit now lies in reducing the time spent in treatment. And though the details vary from one health care company to another, the principles do not. Health care companies control costs by means of two mechanisms: a gatekeeper and "capitation."

The gatekeeper, often not a trained therapist -- or even familiar with the tenets of therapy -- is a bureaucrat who approves, reduces, or denies a doctor's treatment plan. Capitation is a limit, or cap, on the amount of money allotted per patient per year. If the cost of a patient's annual treatment falls short of the cap, the company makes money. If it exceeds the cap, the company loses money. The equation is simple: less care means more profit.

The managed care system was designed to stabilize costs, and on that front it has succeeded. Nationwide, health care inflation, once in the double digits, was down to just 3 percent in 1996, according to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

What has allowed those savings, in part, has been a new generation of drugs based on advances in the understanding of brain chemistry. While business concerns were altering the way mental health treatment was financed, science was altering the way it could be administered.

The new drugs -- more effective than their predecessors, with fewer side effects -- were truly revolutionary. They were cheaper than talk therapy (a year of Prozac runs about $1000, whereas talk therapy with a psychiatrist costs several thousand more), and they could ameliorate symptoms very effectively. Depressed? Take Prozac. Anxious? Take Xanax. Schizophrenic? Take Clozaril.

The new drugs, to be sure, have spawned some miraculous stories. Dr. Joseph Coyle, chairman of the Consolidated Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, tells of one patient, a man from a lower-middle-class background who was the first in his family to go to college. His second year in medical school, he developed schizophrenia.

"We tried everything," says Coyle. "High-dose Haldol, low-dose Haldol, everything, but he just sat in his room. He was not alive for eight years. After Clozaril came out, we tried him on that. He woke up! Last I heard, he was finishing his Ph.D."

But Clozaril, like most drugs, has limitations. Roughly one-half to two-thirds of patients respond poorly. And even for those who do respond Lazarus-like, there are other issues. What does it mean to have a lifelong mental illness? How does the illness affect future possibilities in love and work? Studies show that the best outcomes for patients on medication are for those who also get talk therapy, who get help adjusting to their new self.

A 1992 National Institute of Mental Health study of depression and relapse showed that those who fared best received medication and talk therapy. Eighteen months after a 16-week treatment program, those treated exclusively with medication relapsed at a rate of 50 percent, while those who also received talk therapy had a 33 percent relapse rate. Still high, but significantly lower than the drugs-only approach.

The authors' conclusions? Talk therapy matters. And 16 weeks is not enough treatment for those with major depression. This at a time when many managed care companies permit just 20 appointments per year, and often authorize no more than eight. Is managed care costing more than it saves? A study designed to test that hypothesis would be massive and expensive. The answer is not yet known.

FOR MANAGED care companies, time is money. They work to reduce time spent on treatment, number and length of appointments, and length of hospitalization. Capitation encourages that approach. And gatekeepers enforce it.

The financial and administrative pressure on professionals to treat clients faster is enormous. Psychiatrists get paid less and less and see more and more patients. In 1991, public sector psychiatrists made $90 per half-hour session. Six years later, they make half that. (The private sector isn't faring much better.) The incentive, just to stay even, is to increase the caseload, to pack the work week with patients and leave little time for follow-up and other "collateral care" -- soothing a patient's landlord, talking with someone's mother.

The easiest route is to choose a prescription over talk therapy. After all, a psychiatrist can see many more patients -- and maybe attain his old salary level -- if he sticks to a set of questions and a pill.

This leaves psychiatrists in both the private and public sectors with a difficult choice: do I care more about personal gain or ethical treatment?

Dr. Milt Freudenberg*, a psychiatrist with almost 30 years' experience, explains. By the early 1990s, competition from managed care had diminished his practice from 30 patients to 10. To supplement his income he joined a hospital, where care was managed and statistical averages dictated treatment.

"I was pressured to give prescriptions to patients [who] didn't need them, and asked to keep people [in the hospital] shorter or longer depending on their insurance," he says. "They'd say, `Don't be in a hurry to terminate this patient. He's got good insurance.' " After a number of such incidents, Freudenberg quit in disgust. "I wasn't comfortable with the level of care," he says. "But my children are grown, my house is paid for. If I were 35 and had four young kids, I don't know what compromises I'd make."

Patricia Hayward, a psychiatric nurse, has a similar story to tell. In five years, her employer, Community Healthlink, in Worcester, nearly doubled her "direct care" (therapy) expectations -- and her paperwork -- without alleviating other obligations. She left, she says, rather than give unethical care, but not before considering the alternative.

"I never did this," she says, "but you start to think of ways to cut corners. Like you're supposed to have the patient's chart and check the dosage before you give a shot, but if it wasn't there, you'd say, I know the dose, and you'd think about just giving the shot. Or someone would come in for therapy, and you'd find yourself thinking about paperwork or returning phone calls. If your mind starts wandering during therapy, that's like dropping the baby."

Hayward's and Freudenberg's experiences are typical of managed mental health care, claims Dr. Sam Holden*, a psychiatrist with over 30 years' experience and an appointment at a prominent university. "Insurance companies guide people into `What you need is what we pay for, and what we pay for is Prozac,' " says Holden. He and Freudenberg could cite a half-dozen psychiatrists they knew who had quit in despair.

"Everywhere there's a squeeze on to keep [therapists] from spending too much money," says Dr. Henry Grunebaum, a clinical professor at Harvard Medical School and a psychiatrist with over 30 years' experience. "They all have gatekeepers now. And most gatekeepers are not trained professionals, and even if they are, they don't know the [patient]."

He compares the fate of mental health patients to that of new mothers who get 24 hours of hospitalization. "Many [mothers] are ready to go home after a day, but some should stay two days, some should stay two weeks. [The gatekeepers] make people conform to arbitrary standards." And that, say many psychiatrists, is tough on patients -- even those in non-managed care settings.

Ronnie Darlington agrees. Her 22-year-old son Keith was admitted to a Department of Mental Health hospital for paranoid schizophrenia in January of 1995 and released in April. In June 1995 he committed suicide. Keith was a Medicaid patient, and Medicaid at the time was administered by a managed care company, Mental Health Management of America. Any release decision would have come from a gatekeeper at the company, based on a clinical report from the hospital.

Ronnie Darlington thinks her son's release came too soon. "I look back now," says Darlington, "and I think, it was too fast to be diagnosed, too fast to accept [and] too fast out of the hospital.

"His psychiatrist was destroyed when they discharged him," says Ronnie, "but they [psychiatrists] are just cogs in the wheel. It's the change-purse holder who's running the wheel. The psychiatrists are being told, `Now listen. Let's get this person going here.' "

OVER THE last six years, the average hospitalization at McLean, a Harvard-affiliated mental hospital, has dropped from 70 days to 13. For Medicaid patients, the average hospitalization for September of 1996 was 7.8 days. Yet most drugs take three to four weeks to stabilize people.

Few would argue that long hospital stays are inherently good, or that pure talk therapy is more effective than some of the new medications. The question is, has the pendulum swung too far?

PRACTITIONERS I'VE spoken to say that in a decade, or two at the most, psychiatry as we know it will be extinct.

The ranks of traditional practitioners are dwindling, and managed care has changed the focus of psychiatric training from individual evolution to quick fixes. "The residents know psychotherapy intellectually but hardly ever see a patient for more than a year," says Cecilia Mikalac, a psychiatrist who leads an annual seminar at UMass Medical School.

Sam Holden puts it a different way: "It's as if a surgeon-in-training saw part of the surgery -- opening up the patient, seeing the tumor -- but left before learning how to take it out," he says. "Would you want that surgeon to operate on you?"

We are living through a paradigm shift in our understanding of human beings and how they work, perhaps as great -- and as disorienting -- as the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. If Darwin's theory of evolution made us feel less divine, perhaps the new drugs, the reduction of the brain to a series of chemical functions, make us feel less human.

Few would choose to go back to the days before Clozaril, when an anti-schizophrenic drug gave patients tics and contortions and Parkinson's-like shaking. But what if the patient had the benefit of the powerful new drugs, complemented by the skilled and artful practice of traditional psychotherapy? Thanks to the collision of managed care and psychiatry-by-prescription, we may never know.