Palliative Care for Mental Illness: A Podcast with Dani Chammas and Brent Kious

We’ve talked a lot before about integrating psychiatry into palliative care (see here and here for two examples). Still, we haven’t talked about integrating palliative care into psychiatry or in the care of those with severe mental illness.

On this week’s podcast, we talk with two experts about palliative psychiatry. We invited Dani Chammas, a palliative care physician and psychiatrist at UCSF (and a frequent guest to the GeriPal podcast), as well as Brent Kious, a psychiatrist at the Huntsman Mental Health Institute, focusing on the management of severe persistent mental illnesses.

We discuss the following:

• What is Palliative Psychiatry (and how is it different from Palliative Care Psychiatry)?

• What does it look like to take a palliative approach to severe mental illness?

• Is "terminal" mental illness a thing?

• Is hospice appropriate for people with serious mental illness (and does hospice have the skills to meet their needs?)

• Controversy over Medical Aid in Dying for primary psychiatric illness (and for those with serious medical illness who have a comorbid psychiatric illness)

• The level of provider moral distress that can be created in a system not designed to meet the needs of specific populations... and when we are asked to meet a need we don't feel equipped to meet.

Here are a couple of articles if you want to do a deeper dive:

• Dani and colleagues article on “Psychiatry and Palliative Care: Growing the Interface Through Education.”

• Dani and colleagues article on “Palliative Care Psychiatry: Building Synergy Across the Spectrum.”

• Brent’s article on “Physician Aid-in-Dying and Suicide Prevention in Psychiatry: A Moral Crisis?”

• A NY Times article titled “Should Patients Be Allowed to Die From Anorexia?”