Op-Ed Contributors

Quality psychiatric care is needed

By Maurice Preter (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-05 08:00

However, quality medical care, and especially mental health care, begins with a well-trained and experienced physician who is able to create a therapeutic alliance with a suffering and often frightened, and ashamed patient.

By contrast, the lack of time spent with an individual patient (when there are countless individuals waiting to be seen), combined with the economic reality of multiplying one's salary by writing huge numbers of prescriptions puts Chinese doctors under undue and undeclared influence from extraneous forces, namely the pharmaceutical industry.

In turn, patients are at risk of receiving sub-optimal diagnosis and care and are put in harm's way by medication overuse.

On a positive note, the Chinese government is taking steps to alleviate the existing income and infrastructure discrepancies between the Eastern coastal areas and the countryside, which will improve general medical, and one hopes, mental health care.

Equally important, a whole generation of sophisticated, highly motivated psychiatric physicians and non-medical psychotherapists is coming of age (in the big cities), educated in part thanks to outside efforts by not-for-profit organizations such as the Chinese American Psychoanalytic Alliance (CAPA).

Regarding the proposed health care reform, China might conclude that there is little synergy between corporate business models and her huge population's need for accessible medical care.

The conflicts of interest that have come to shake US academia will need to be addressed here as well. At the same time, doctors' working conditions must be improved. Eventually, consideration should be given to the establishment of a rational tort system that does not simply copy the excesses of the US system. There is much reason for hope and much work to be done. Chinese society, patients and doctors will be better off for it.

The author is a US educated neurologist and psychiatrist based in New York City, and a faculty member of Columbia University and the Chinese American Psychoanalytic Alliance.

(China Daily 07/05/2010 page8)