On mental illness and stigma in medicine

Today I saw a patient for a pre-operative evaluation. This is a consultation for a patient that needs surgery, but who has other medical problems that make the surgeon nervous, and the surgeon basically wants someone like me to sign that I evaluated the person so that I can be blamed if something goes wrong. At least that’s my semi-cynical version of it. My fully-cynical version of it is that surgeons make relatively little money seeing a patient in clinic (though a lot more than a family doc or internist does), and they don’t want to waste time evaluating a patient when they could be operating and billing for the real benjamins.

Of course, I’m messing with the details of the story, but it went something like this: this woman was elderly, but under 80, and had the usual medical problems that go with that age, but not more – mild diabetes, mild high blood pressure, a few other things like that, but no history of smoking, no lung disease and no significant heart disease.
I think that over time I’ve collected a few doctor readers, so I’ll add this list of meds, more or less: some vitamins, a beta blocker, metformin, maybe there was an ACE inhibitor in there, can’t remember, a statin, a laxative, a bisphosphonate and some ranitidine, and a few other drugs, which I will get to in a minute.

She also had a recently discovered cancer, which was the occasion for the operation. The operation is a large one, but not “heroic” or the kind of thing they call people to come sit in the balcony to observe. It’s not a Whipple or anything close, but it’s not a lumpectomy either. It probably will not lead to a cure, but will almost certainly lengthen her life considerably, and will definitely prevent at least some of the uglier complications in the future. It is the standard of care.

Now, the rub: one of her diagnoses was “Depression.” No further explanation. In addition to the above, she also receives lithium at a healthy dose as well as paroxetine. This was the first time I saw her and she is an immigrant who does not speak any language I speak, so we had to speak through her son translating. But she was perfectly pleasant, totally coherent (able to give full medical and surgical history since childhood) as far as I could tell without speaking her language. To my shame, I didn’t ask what her profession had been. (I just didn’t think to while trying to sort out a complicated medical history.) I had never seen her before, and she came with almost no written medical information other than the recent imaging and investigations that were directly related to this cancer. I have no idea how her depression presented, why lithium was added, how long she had been stable or ill, or anything about that particular illness other than what I saw. To be fair, I also had no information about the history and control of her diabetes or blood pressure, though all three issues were controlled during my examination – blood pressure was good, sugars fine as well as HBA1C.

And then this: among all of her documents, I come across a paper that is a statement by a consultant psychiatrist that she is competent and able to both consent to and undergo the operation.

The surgeon and anesthesiologist had both refused to treat her without this evaluation. The surgeon’s referral put the demand for a full psychiatric evaluation (at the family’s expense) above cardiac, geriatric, oncologic, or functional evaluation, and refused to proceed or even make a tentative statement on her suitability for operation without this.

The surgeon, for that matter, does not speak her language either. But I assume he saw a similar patient to the one I did, as he had seen her less than 3 weeks before.

Just the fact that she came in taking certain medications, with a psychiatric diagnosis, one that, for that matter, has no bearing on her ability to decide how to live her life or to comprehend information, could have caused life-prolonging, standard-of-care treatment for cancer to have been withheld, to have been considered “inappropriate” or “unnecessary” or “unsuitable.”

In her case, fortunately, the psychiatrist did not write a full three page summary of her personal flaws (as I have seen sometimes in these types of evaluations), but rather summed it up with a line something like, “Patient understands implications of illness and treatment options and is competent to make any and all judgments blah blah blah.” But how many of these cases never make it that far? How many times, when surgery is an option, do surgeons see a diagnosis like that, or a drug like lithium and decide that the patient simply isn’t a candidate for surgery, or decide not to present all of the options?

I also wonder, if it had been an older man with “depression,” whether he would have been put through this humiliating evaluation, or whether only hysterical women need to be qualified as competent. Or if it had only been the paroxetine and not the lithium? What was it that pushed her into questionable incompetence? Does the referring doctor understand the implications of demanding an evaluation like that – that they are essentially calling into question a person’s sovereignty over their own body? I am hard-pressed to think of any kind of mental disability, including those conditions that include intellectual disability, in which a person cannot be presented with options in a manner fitting their understanding.

I don’t know whether to be angry, or to want to cry, or what. But I think mostly I’m afraid that someday I will be that little old lady with an ugly diagnosis on my chart, whose life is seen as only questionably worth saving.

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