Front Matter

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: From Dispensers to Collaborators

2 Relationship Matters

3 Prescribing Alliances

4 Peak Performance: Prescribing in the Context of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

5 Visions and Voices: Prescribing in the Context of Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders

6 Stabilization Forces: Prescribing in the Context of Bipolar Disorder

7 Frayed Edges: Prescribing in the Context of Depressive and Anxiety Disorders

8 Unwelcome Strangers: Prescribing in the Context of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders

9 Building Peace: Prescribing in the Context of Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders

10 When the Body Speaks: Prescribing in the Context of Somatic Distress

11 Befriending the Body: Prescribing in the Context of Eating Disorders

12 Getting Clean: Prescribing in the Context of Substance Use Disorders

13 Knowing and Being Known: Prescribing in the Context of Neurocognitive Disorders

14 Strong Emotions: Prescribing in the Context of Borderline Personality Disorder

Epilogue: From Fixing to Attending

Appendix: Alliance Measures

Index

Warren A. Kinghorn, M.D., Th.D., is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center; Esther Colliflower Associate Professor of the Practice of Pastoral and Moral Theology and Co-Director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School; and Staff Psychiatrist at Durham VA Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

Abraham M. Nussbaum, M.D., M.T.S., is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Assistant Dean of Graduate Medical Education at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and Chief Education Officer at Denver Health in Denver, Colorado.

This book is a fruit of friendship and shared conversation. It began with our own conversations, through the years, with teachers, colleagues, students, and each other. It has continued through conversation with the clinicians featured in the chapters that follow, from whom we have learned much. We offer this book as an invitation to conversation about prescribing relationships that matter.

Though we completed our psychiatry residency training only a few miles from each other in North Carolina—albeit on two very different sides of the Carolina-Duke Tobacco Road rivalry!—our own conversation and collaboration began with the generous encouragement of Houston community leaders Roy and Laura Nichol, who supported us in organizing a 2014 conference focused on mental health care within faith communities. Our conversations continued as colleagues within a faculty development program hosted by the University of Chicago. But the conversations specific to this book stem from a 2018 conference at Duke University, sponsored by the McDonald Agape Foundation, titled “Prescribing Wisely: Psychiatric Medications and the Whole Person.” We are grateful for the featured presenters at that conference—Sue Estroff, Lynne Vanderpot, Jason Ashe, Damon Tweedy, David Mintz, Calvin Gross, Jean Beckham, Sarah Wilson, Geetha Jayaram, Theresa Coles, and Sidney Zisook—and to the many attendees who gave life to those discussions. Calvin Gross also assisted with a valuable review of empirical literature on the relationship of the therapeutic alliance to prescribing outcomes.

We are grateful to Dan Blazer and Joel Yager, who have mentored and encouraged us in this project, and all of our fellow prescribing clinicians who seek to be collaborators, and not just dispensers. We thank our students and residents for encouraging us to clarify our thoughts. We thank Chawtana Edwards and Danielle Foley for assisting Dr. Nussbaum in securing research papers and scheduling interviews. We also thank John McDuffie, Erika Parker, Annie Birge, and all the staff at American Psychiatric Association Publishing, with whom we have enjoyed an engaging publishing relationship.

We thank the remarkable clinicians who spoke with us for this project; they are all true collaborators. Where appropriate, we have included portions of those conversations. Interviews have been edited for clarity, and each chapter was available for review by the clinician before publication.

Finally, we are especially grateful to our spouses, Susan and Elin, and to our children, Ava, Mills, Eamon, Mary Clare, and Helena Frances, for sticking with us through this project, all the projects that have come before it, and the projects that await.