Question

How do we keep mental health patient compliant with medication

Answer 1

Ans) Best practices that mental health professionals should incorporate into their medication noncompliance intervention strategies:
- Practice empathy.
- Find out the patient's attitude toward medication.
- Employ a shared decision-making (SDM) care model.
- Show patients long-term medication adherence is a good thing.

The single most significant reason why individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder fail to take their medication is because of their lack of awareness of their illness (anosognosia). Other important reasons are concurrent alcohol or drug abuse; costs; and a poor relationship between psychiatrist and patient.

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Compliance with treatment, or treatment adherence, is a very important clinical issue. In prescribing medication, compliance usually means "the extent to which the patient takes the medication as prescribed". Many mental disorders require more than just a brief medication intervention. For some patients, several months or years of medication or even lifelong medication is necessary. For instance, the recommended treatment time for the first episode of depression is six to 12 months, but almost half of patients stop taking their antidepressant within three months for various reasons.

- Noncompliance can have serious consequences, such as relapse or recurrence of the illness. Therefore, enhancing medication compliance (or preventing noncompliance) is an important treatment goal for patients and clinicians. The first step in this process is the recognition and prevention of factors that could lead to noncompliance.