Yesterday one of Australia’s most prominent psychiatrists,
Professor Ian Hickie, wrote an
op-ed piece in the SMH titled,
“Ignore the critics, public need to back fresh start in mental healthcare”. It
is part of a growing controversy around the Gillard government’s apparent big
boost to mental health funding in this year’s Budget, in particular around the
adoption of the Headspace model of youth early intervention and the downsizing
of the Better Access psychology scheme.
In response I wrote this letter to the editor (second one here):
I’m a public hospital
psychiatrist who greatly admires Ian Hickie for his tireless efforts in mental
health research and advocacy. However, I thought his intemperate spray at
opponents of his preferred set of policy and treatment prescriptions — in
particular the controversial early intervention model he and Pat McGorry have
championed — demeaned his position and the serious debates in question.
I recently attended an
international conference where McGorry and other advocates of early
intervention spoke, and what came through was how little evidence there was for
the “Headspace” model that our government has adopted so enthusiastically.
There is also very little evidence for the use of medications in patients
thought to be at risk of psychosis.
Professor Hickie uses an old
debating trick, rolling a disparate group of critics into one list without
seriously addressing any of their concerns. By mentioning Scientologists
alongside professional detractors, in one of his four main points, he seems to
want to deflect public attention from debates within psychiatry rather than
illuminating them.
Professor Hickie is dead right
that psychiatrists should devote their time to debating
public policy and arguing for social change. But that also means
engaging in explanation rather than bombast when criticised. The public (and
his colleagues) will thank him for the former and not the latter.
The crisis in
psychiatry
The tone of Hickie’s article and the controversy from which
it emerges can only be understood in terms of a wider crisis of psychiatry,
both in Australia and internationally.
Anyone following the debates over the American Psychiatric
Association’s planned fifth edition of its diagnostic handbook, the DSM-5, will know that the process has
been thrown into turmoil by attacks on the secrecy surrounding its development,
its attempts to introduce contested new diagnostic categories, the debacle over
its new personality disorder model (opposed by almost every leading personality
disorder researcher in the US), and the fact that the psychiatrists who led the
creation of DSM-III (Robert
Spitzer) and DSM-IV (Allen Frances) — hardly
fringe radicals — have both publicly attacked
the next iteration.
This comes in the wake of even more generalised problems for
the profession. In the US there have been controversies related to
overdiagnosis and overprescribing of medications. Even George W Bush felt he
had to attack the epidemic of ADHD diagnosis and stimulant prescribing in
children, and now there is deep concern that the diagnosis of bipolar disorder
across all ages is leading to the dangerous overuse of “second generation”
antipsychotics. Globally, there have been scandals over the close financial
ties between academic psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry, with humiliation
of thought leaders in the field.
Perhaps most devastating of all has been growing evidence
that some of the most prescribed medications of all time, the modern
antidepressants, may
have little more effect than placebo in the treatment of “major depression”,
a finding that has not only undermined the cache of drug therapy of mental
disorders, but thrown into question the validity of the diagnosis itself. It is
in this context that we can understand why data about the growing prevalence of
mental disorder diagnoses — often used by advocates like Hickie and McGorry as
a reason for boosting funding and services — is being challenged both within
and outside psychiatry. Is it really true that more than half the population
will have an episode of an “illness” called “major depression” in their
lifetimes, or is this an artefact of how such an illness is constructed,
measured and contextualised? And does this mean that everyone who meets
criteria must pop a tablet or go to 12 sessions of cognitive behavioural
therapy?
Public questioning of psychiatry probably hasn’t
reached the fever pitch of the 1960s and 70s, when powerful anti-psychiatry and
mental health reform movements exacerbated the discipline’s own internal
contradictions. That crisis was resolved in the 1970s and 80s with the victory
of a particular biomedical model of mental disorder that put reliability of
diagnosis ahead of pretty much all other considerations. Apparently turning to
models found in the rest of medicine, the approach codified in DSM-III was meant to re-establish the
scientificity of psychiatry against accusations it was either meaningless or
simply a tool of social repression.
Today’s problems represent the spasmodic unravelling of that
model, its inability to deliver “scientific” (read: biological reductionist)
answers to the questions posed by disturbances of thought and emotion. This is
not a problem found in psychiatry alone — the genomic revolution and
bloated drug company bottom lines have failed to deliver the kinds of advances
they promised also — but it is naturally concentrated in the speciality
where social determinants of health and illness operate most obviously.
The last decade has seen not only growing critiques of this
impasse but attempts to forge new ways of thinking about mental health. Most,
however, seek radical changes to the existing framework and not its outright
rejection. So, for example, Sydney University philosopher Dominic
Murphy argues that psychiatry needs to find its scientific
basis in modern cognitive neuroscience. Psychiatrists and historians Edward
Shorter and David Healy
look back to earlier periods of scientific advance to make a powerful case that
older
antidepressants and shock
therapy were more effective than more recent (and more profitable) drugs.
Psychologist Richard
Bentall rejects the biomedical and diagnostic focuses of psychiatry in
favour of a symptom-based and psychotherapeutic approach.
To his credit, Pat McGorry also bases his advocacy of an
early intervention or “staging” model on the reasonable belief that the tools
bequeathed by the diagnostic psychiatrists of DSM-III have proven inadequate. Indeed, McGorry very much sees his
efforts as part of an attempt to lead a “scientific revolution” in
the Kuhnian sense — to replace a failed old paradigm with a new, better
one. As it says in McGorry
and Hickie’s statement of their new paradigm,
Diagnosis in psychiatry
increasingly struggles to fulfil its key purposes, namely, to guide treatment
and to predict outcome. The clinical staging model, widely used in clinical
medicine yet virtually ignored in psychiatry, is proposed as a more refined
form of diagnosis which could restore the utility of diagnosis, promote early
intervention and also make more sense of the confusing array of biological
research findings in psychiatry by organizing data into a coherent
clinicopathological framework.
It is my contention that this simply deepens the
contradictions found in the existing model of diagnostic psychiatry rather than
overcoming them. Yet the problem is one faced by all of medicine, which seeks
to define health and illness without recognising that such definitions are socially constructed. Medicine follows
what may be called a positivist research programme, where value judgements about
health and illness are naturalised and eternised, rather than being recognised
in their social and historical specificity. Drawing on the pioneering work of Peter Sedgwick, I have
written about these issues elsewhere — in
a review of Bentall’s last book and an
analysis of the limits of antipsychiatry.
The problems with
early intervention
It is worth looking at some of the more fine-grain problems
with McGorry’s importation of “clinical staging” into psychosis (and other
conditions — he has also been part of developing such a model in bipolar
disorder, and supports efforts around depression and borderline personality).* Simply
put, it may both be an inappropriate analogy to draw for psychiatric disorders
but it may also suffer from the limits of staging for most physical illnesses.
Staging depends on being able to find markers of the very
early phases of an illness process and, through targeted intervention, prevent
progression to later, less treatable phases. A classic example is bowel cancer,
where screening for and treatment of early cancer (or pre-cancerous cell
changes) with colonoscopies in high-risk individuals (e.g. those with a strong
family history) may prevent the devastating metastatic form of the illness.
But in psychiatry we don't have any specific biological (or
other) markers to target, and so it’s the “ultra high risk” (UHR) syndrome itself
that is being targeted. This actually parallels the rest of medicine where claims
made for biomarkers have proven to be overhyped.
There is also no evidence that there are specific symptoms
or parts of the UHR syndrome that, if treated, will prevent onset of psychosis.
This is reflected in the fact that only 31 percent of UHR patients “convert” to
some kind of actual psychotic syndrome by the two-year mark. And it is not
clear whether this is a homogenous group — they probably include a mix of
diagnoses and not just schizophrenia. Of the remaining 69 percent, a very high
proportion continue to function poorly despite not becoming psychotic,
suggesting this syndrome is “UHR for poor function” more than specifically “UHR
for psychosis”. Importantly, UHR subjects are pretty much all are
self-referrals (perhaps with nudging from families) and so they are unlike
typical schizophrenic patients in that they display higher levels of insight
and engagement.
The population benefit claims being made by McGorry &
Hickie are undermined by the fact that Headspace centres are not population
interventions but places that self-selected patients seek help around relatively
non-specific problems. Hence why there is virtually no evidence base for
Headspace — nobody has really defined what it is meant to help and who it is
going to be accessed by in any previous trials. Thus there is a real possibility
that the initiative will prevent little of the serious mental illness (or even “neurotic”
disorders) that are being treated today because it targets a different
population — this issue has simply not been clarified. Don’t get me wrong,
Headspace may prove to be very beneficial to the young people it treats, but to
say it is evidence-based would not be correct.
Even for individuals, there is little clear evidence that
targeted interventions for UHR subjects will work to do anything more than
delay onset of psychosis, and then not past two years. Ironically, there is evidence
that once you have been UHR for two years, there is minimal chance you will
convert to frank psychosis anyhow. Certainly the recent Cochrane review has
effectively stopped research into the use of antipsychotics in the UHR group,
and fish oil needs further testing. Talk of antidepressants being effective is
based on retrospective clinical audits, a relatively weak and unreliable form
of evidence (and the idea that a non-antipsychotic drugs are effective in
preventing psychosis further undermines the claimed specificity of the UHR concept).
McGorry persisted with hopes around medication-based
interventions until the recent controversy over ethics approval blew up. Why
would he do so? In this he was only following the pattern of mainstream
psychiatry, which maintains a narrow focus on intervention equalling some kind
of individualised treatment, whether biological or psychological. There’s a
reason medicine (the profession) is called medicine (after medications). That
focus is shaped by a complex of forces, in particular the growing influence of
Big Pharma over the last 30 years.
Finally, even psychosocial interventions for individuals may
not be much chop. If medical epidemiology teaches us anything it's that to
change the population incidence and prevalence of many conditions you
need population measures. Clean running water and sewage systems
prevent many more deaths from illness than all the high-tech medical advances
put together. Maybe to decrease the incidence of psychosis we need to look at
social and environmental measures.
Politics and
psychiatry inseparably linked
None of the above critique is particularly original, nor is
it based on anything but the arguments and evidence marshalled by enthusiasts
of early intervention (including McGorry himself). So how did McGorry and
Hickie gain so much sway over government policy in the first place? Clearly
they are tireless and strategic campaigners for their particular solution for
the problems they see in mental health service delivery. They have also
correctly identified that the current mainstream psychiatric framework is weak
and in need of challenge. But there is something about their model that also
fits well with current neoliberal governance models, including Gillard’s
preferred preventative health and social inclusion agendas.
In essence, early intervention in psychiatry matches the
kinds of preventative health models that dominate in Australian public policy: That
while there are social determinants of health and illness, governments can only
intervene at the individual level, targeting those who are (through their own
behaviour) “at risk”. Social policy thus becomes targeted at individuals or
families rather than entire populations. The justification is that this is more
cost-effective (an unproven assumption, but one fitting well with
neoliberalism’s ideological aversion to universal social provision) and that if
behaviour change is not then produced governments can more easily blame
individuals for their own failings than turn the spotlight on social
structures.
I’m not arguing that this is how McGorry and Hickie see it,
but why their model may have become so favoured. It is interesting that Hickie
has in the past advocated for more
market discipline in health care, and that both Hickie and McGorry seem to
have argued for dropping the expansion of Medicare-funded psychological
services (Better Access) on the basis that its (flawed) universalism was
creating a type of middle-class welfare. It is their reflex acceptance of the
social status quo that is the problem, perhaps intensified by having to adapt
to the health bureaucracies they have been lobbying so intensely.
One of Hickie’s targets yesterday seems to have been a
recent piece by the right-wing psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed that argued for
psychiatrists to stop being so noisy about public policy (bizarre given the
author’s frequent ideological rants about psychiatric concepts). It is here
that I am with Hickie and McGorry in recognising the fundamentally political
nature of debates about not only mental health policy, but the very nature of
mental health and illness. How human beings individually experience our society
cannot be separated from collective projects for social change and (perish the
thought) human liberation. Unfortunately, I fear that despite their
passionate beliefs, good intentions and political savvy, McGorry and Hickie have
delivered a model that mostly serves to suit the public policy needs of a historically transient phase of
capitalist development we call neoliberalism.
* It is important to distinguish McGorry’s work on first
episode psychosis, which has a firmer evidence base and doesn’t depend on the
staging heuristic, from his approach to early intervention strategies (or “indicated
prevention” as it is known in preventative health jargon).
Dr_Tad is a public hospital psychiatrist. The views expressed here are
entirely his own.
