Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2024 Jul 3;43(5):383-396.
doi: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2378092. Epub 2024 Jul 22.

Pharmaceuticalization and Care Coordination in New York City Outpatient Mental Health

Neil Krishan Aggarwal  1
Affiliations

Pharmaceuticalization and Care Coordination in New York City Outpatient Mental Health

Neil Krishan Aggarwal. Med Anthropol. .

Abstract

US government quality measures prioritize pharmaceuticalization and care coordination to promote patient treatment adherence. How these measures affect outpatient mental health service delivery and patient-provider communication where psychiatrists and nonphysicians collaborate is understudied. Analyzing 500 hours of participant-observation, 117 appointments, and 98 interviews with 45 new patients and providers, I show that psychiatrists and social workers coordinated care by encouraging medications and seeing two mental health providers as the default treatment, irrespective of patient preferences. Ethnographic perspectives crucially account for models of service delivery and provider behaviors in researching treatment adherence.

Keywords: United States of America; medications; mental health; psychiatry; split treatment.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

References

    1. Aggarwal NK 2013. Cultural psychiatry, medical anthropology, and the DSM-5 field trials. Medical Anthropology 32(5):393–398. - PubMed
    1. American Psychiatric Association. 2010. Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Patients With Major Depressive Disorder: Third Edition. https://psychiatryonline.org/pb/assets/raw/sitewide/practice_guidelines/.... - PubMed
    1. Arnold L, & Black SP. 2020. How communicative approaches enrich the study of care. Medical Anthropology 39(7):573–581. - PubMed
    1. Baruch RL, Vishnevsky B, and Kalman T. 2015. Split-care patients and their caregivers: How collaborative is collaborative care? Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 203(6):412–417. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Berchick ER, Hood E, and Barnett JC. 2018. Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2017. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources