Offering patients opportunities to reveal their subjective experiences in psychiatric assessment interviews

What to take up from the patient's talk? The clinician's responses to the patient's self-disclosure of their subjective experience in the psychiatric intake interview

During psychiatric diagnostic interviews, the clinician's question usually targets specific symptom descriptions based on diagnostic categories for ICD-10/DSM-5 (2, 3). While some patients merely answer questions, others go beyond to describe their subjective experiences in a manner that highlights the intensity and urgency of those experiences. By adopting conversation analysis as a method, this study examines diagnostic interviews conducted in an outpatient clinic in South Finland and identifies sequences that divulge patients' subjective experiences. From 10 audio-recorded diagnostic interviews, 40 segments were selected where patients replied to medically or factually oriented questions with their self-disclosures. The research focus was on the clinicians' responses to these disclosures. We present five sequential trajectories that the clinicians offered third-position utterances in response to their patients' self-disclosure of subjective experiences. These trajectories include the following: 1) the clinician transfers the topic to a new agenda question concerning a medical or factual theme; 2) the clinician presents a follow-up question that selects a topic from the patient's self-disclosure of a subjective experience that may orient either towards the medical/factual side or the experiential side of the patient's telling; 3) the clinician provides an expert interpretation of the patient's self-disclosure of his or her subjective experience from the clinician's expert perspective; 4) the clinician gives advice that orients mainly to a treatment recommendation or to another activity; and 5) the clinician presents a formulation that focusses on the core of their patient's self-disclosure of his or her subjective experience from the patient's perspective. In addition, we present what these responsive practices invoke from the patient in the next turn. We argue that an awareness of these strategies facilitates both the diagnosis and an appropriate therapeutic relationship during the psychiatric assessment interview. Finally, we discuss the clinical significance of our results regarding the patient's agency and the clinician's more conscious patient-centred orientation in the psychiatric assessment procedure.

'Is it in your basic personality?' Negotiations about traits and context in diagnostic interviews for personality disorders

What does it mean to claim that somebody's personality is disordered? The aim in this paper is to examine how the process of diagnosing personality disorders (PD) unfolds on a practical level. We take an in-depth look at PD interviews, paying close attention to the occasional discrepancies in the clinicians' and the patients' approaches to generalising the behaviour of patients to describe their personality. Clinicians are guided by the medical model and structured interviews in their approach. We regard the interview situation as interplay between the institution, the clinician and the patient - and the final diagnosis as an interactional construction between them. Our data consists of video-recorded interviews in Finland with 10 adult patients and three psychiatric nurses. The collection was compiled from 22 excerpts in which the participants orient differently to the generalisability of personality traits. Our observations show that, in these interviews, patients frequently make sense of their behaviour differently from what is expected - not as a reflection of their personality traits, but as an outcome of many situational factors. Our understanding leads us to emphasise the importance of making visible the practices that shape the diagnostic process in psychiatry.

Kann die Psychoanalyse noch aus ihren Krisen lernen?

Mit dem neuen Psychotherapeutengesetz ist eine ernste Lage für die Psychoanalyse entstanden. Auf die eine Gefahr, die technologische Medizinalisierung (Buchholz 2017b, c; Buchholz und Kächele 2019), wurde häufig verwiesen. Eine wachsende Abhängigkeit von der klinischen Psychologie (Slunecko 2021) ist noch wenig gesehen. Wie kann sich die Psychoanalyse behaupten? Vorgeschlagen wird, sich verstärkt Fragen nach a) Ausbildung therapeutischer Persönlichkeiten, b) stärkerer lebensweltlicher Kontextualisierung und c) weit größerer Aufmerksamkeit der originalen Stimme der Patienten in Theorie und Kasuistik zu widmen. Loyalität gegenüber Theorie-Traditionen löst keine Probleme. Sie blockiert Umweltsensitivität und erzeugt Rückzug in Selbstbeschäftigung und beunruhigenden Mangel an Irritierbarkeit. Die viel zu loyale Bindung an Theorietraditionen, an lehranalytische Aus- und Vorbilder, supervisorische Praktiken und an fragliche Behandlungsregeln wehrt die Irritation ab, deren Bewältigung zentrale Aufgabe wäre, und entmutigt die nächste Generation. Dazu am Schluss Vorschläge.

The interactive work of narrative elicitation in person-centred care: Analysis of phone conversations between health care professionals and patients with common mental disorders

INTRODUCTION

Narratives play a central part in person-centred care (PCC) as a communicative means of attending to patients' experiences. The present study sets out to explore what activities are performed and what challenges participants face in the interactive process of narrative elicitation, carried through in patient-professional communication in a remote intervention based on PCC.

METHODS

Data were gathered from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in a Swedish city where health care professionals (HCPs) conducted remote PCC for patients on sick leave due to common mental disorders. A sample of eleven audio-recorded phone conversations between HCPs and patients enroled in the RCT were collected and subjected to conversation analysis.

RESULTS

Three interactive patterns in narrative elicitation were identified: Completed narrative sequences driven by the patient, question-driven narrative sequences guided by the HCP, and narrative sequences driven as a collaborative project between the patient and the HCP. In the question-driven narrative sequences, communication was problematic for both participants and they did not accomplish a narrative. In the other two patterns, narratives were accomplished but through various collaborative processes.

CONCLUSION

This study provides insight into what challenges narrative elicitation may bring in the context of a remote PCC intervention and what interactive work patients and HCP need to engage in. Importantly, it also highlights tensions in the ethics of PCC and its operationalization, if the pursuit of a narrative is not properly balanced against the respect for patients' integrity and personal preferences. Our findings also show that narrative elicitation may represent an interactive process in PCC in which illness narratives are jointly produced, negotiated and transformed.

PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION

Stakeholders, including patient representatives, were involved in the design of the main study (the RCT). They have been involved in discussions on research questions and dissemination throughout the study period. They have not been involved in conducting the present study.

Discussing mental health difficulties in a "diagnosis free zone"

Being identified as "mentally ill" is a complicated social process that may be stigmatizing and socially problematic, as a mental illness diagnosis determines the criteria for what is considered normal. This has given rise to a number of anti-stigma campaigns designed to create awareness of the way stigmas affect people with mental health difficulties and to normalize those difficulties in society. One such campaign is the "diagnosis-free zone", which declares that those with mental health difficulties should not be categorized on the basis of their diagnosis; rather, they should be encountered as full individuals. In this paper, we investigate how mental health difficulties are discussed in Clubhouse communities, which adhere to the "diagnosis free zone" programme. The findings are based on conversation analysis of 29 video-recorded rehabilitation group meetings, in one Finnish Clubhouse, intended to advance clients' return to the labour market. The analysis demonstrated that members referred to their mental health difficulties to explain the misfortunes in their lives, especially interruptions and stoppages in their careers. By contrast, staff members disattended members' explanations and normalized their situations as typical of all humans and thus unrelated to their mental health difficulties as such. In this way, the discussion of mental health difficulties at the Clubhouse meetings was implicitly discouraged. We propose that the standards of normality expected of a person not suffering from a mental health difficulty may well be different from the expectations levelled at participants with a history of mental problems. Therefore, instead of considering cultural expectations of normality to be a unified domain, effective anti-stigma work might sometimes benefit from referring to mental-health diagnoses as a means of explicitly tailoring expectations of normality.

The Patients' Practises Disclosing Subjective Experiences in the Psychiatric Intake Interview

In psychiatric diagnostic interviews, a clinician's question designed to elicit a specific symptom description is sometimes met with the patient's self-disclosure of their subjective experience. In shifting the topical focus to their subjective experiences, the patients do something more or something other than just answering the question. Using conversation analysis, we examined such sequences in diagnostic interviews in an outpatient clinic in Finland. From 10 audio-recorded diagnostic interviews, we found 45 segments where medical questions were met with patients' self-disclosures. We show four sequential trajectories that enable this shift of topic and action. There are four possible trajectories: (1) the patient first answers the medical question and the clinician acknowledges this answer, whereupon the patient shifts to a self-disclosure of their subjective experience; (2) the patient first gives the medical answer but shifts to self-disclosure without the clinician's acknowledgement of that answer; (3) the patient produces an extensive answer to the medical question and, in the course of producing this, shifts into the self-disclosure; (4) the patient does not offer a medical answer but designs the self-disclosure as if it were the answer to the medical question. We argue that in the shifts to the self-disclosure of their subjective negative experience, the patients take local control of the interaction. These shifts also embody a clash between the interactional projects of the participants. At the end of the paper, we discuss the clinical relevance of our results regarding the patient's agency and the goals of the psychiatric assessment.