Palliative Care and Mental Illness

Robin Williams’ death prompted a small flurry of tweets and articles looking for more awareness of and attention to mental health. Earl Quijada (@equijada) and I had a short exchange that really got me thinking about how we view mental illness in the medical world. Our palliative care team cares for a fair number of patients with serious medical illness (cancer, heart failure, etc) who also have serious mental illness (SMI) such as profound depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, etc. In my experience, there are unique challenges to providing the best care to these patients for both their health-care providers and their loved ones. Additionally, it seems likely that these patients experience the medical system in a way that is different and perhaps more challenging to them personally than patients without SMI, creating the potential for suffering.

With those thoughts in mind, here are the topics for discussion for this week’s #hpm Tweetchat:

1. How does the medical establishment care now for patients with serious mental illness(SMI)?
2. What role does palliative care have in improving the care of patients with SMI?
3. What challenges do we perceive for providing palliative care in patients with SMI? What opportunities exist?
4. Should palliative care consultation be part of the routine care for patients with SMI?

If you are new to Tweetchats, please see this overview. You can follow along on platforms like nurph.com, Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.

What: #hpm Tweetchat
When: Wed 8/27/2014 - 9p ET/ 6p PT
Host: Dr. Meredith MacMartin
Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/276720409189081

After the chat, we will post the transcript and analytics here.

For more on #hpm Tweetchats see our archive of transcripts and analytics, and other Twitter-related posts here on Pallimed.
For more posts on psychiatry on Pallimed, click here.