Article: Managing Compliance

MANAGING COMPLIANCE Psychiatric Times, by Dr. Richard Balon.

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 twelve 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.

I found this article interesting because it addresses the role of toxic effects on noncompliance and hopefully will offer others in the class insight into how significant a factor it is in developing treatment strategies.

See http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/p020543.html


Thanks to Richard G.