Collaboration in Psychopharmacotherapy

Abstract

Collaboration in pharmacotherapy implies a professional willing to prescribe an effective medication and a patient willing to adhere to the therapeutic regimen in order for both to achieve their common goal. This relationship requires trust in the relationship, collaboration in goal setting, and effective means for promoting and restoring mental health. Variables like illness insight and patients' attitudes towards medication should be dealt within a collaborative relationship. Several methods of shared decision making, culled from the research literature and clinical experience, promote such prescriber-patient collaboration and, even more specifically, medication adherence. Detailed physician-patient interactions in 2 cases, one of a depressed patient and one of a patient suffering from schizophrenia, serve to highlight common difficulties in the management of pharmacotherapy in the context of a collaborative relationship.

Creating opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and patient‐centred care: how nurses, doctors, pharmacists and patients use communication strategies when managing medications in an acute hospital setting

“…Patients’ trust in doctors is essential to open information exchange during medication consultations (Simos ). To engage patients freely in conversations, doctors were reported to employ partnership‐building strategies (e.g.…”

The rationale for shared decision making in mental health care: a systematic review of academic discourse

“…Even if this legislation was not actively enforced, authors described how an implicit threat, or fear, of coercion can be a barrier to open and honest discussions about an individual's mental health and can stop them from playing an active part in decisions about their care (Deegan, 2007;Morant et al, 2015). By recognising people accessing mental health services as experts alongside clinicians, promoting mutual respect, open and honest communication and a collaborative way of working, SDM was seen as a way for people to take back control (Hamann, Cohen, Leucht, Busch, & Kissling, 2007;Lee King et al, 2015;Simos, 2012). Some also argued that the successful implementation of SDM could have a transformative impact on the 'professional identity' of psychiatry, distancing the profession from its historic reputation as an agent of social control and bringing it more in line with the rest of medicine by sharing ideals of good practice in relation to SDM (Quirk, Chaplin, Lelliott, & Seale, 2012).…”