Shrink Rap News

Does Anybody Know...


 

My community has a listserv – an email forum that lets any member send a message to every other member – with more than 900 families and e-mails that go from morning to night. I can't begin to describe the spectrum of what transpires here, but this is not the neighborhood where it goes unnoticed if you drive too fast, don’t clean up after your dog. And if you need to borrow crutches for a few weeks, or need a referral for almost anything from a chimney repairman to a dermatologist, it often takes only minutes to get your needs met. The sense of community that the listserv fosters is quite remarkable.

So what about a listserv for psychiatrists? If there’s a question about the availability of resources, or curiosity about the efficacy of a new treatment, or even just a desire to share a reaction to an article in the newspaper, why shouldn’t the local district branches have such a forum? After all, a listserv can be started as a Google Group for free, by anyone, anywhere.

In Maryland, the Maryland Psychiatric Society started such a listserv in May of 2009. It turns out that psychiatrists, as a group, are prone to worry. It wasn’t long before a member wanted to know if a patient could sue him for a suggestion he gave to another doctor on the listserv. It got the MPS leadership to poke around. MedChi did not think this was a good idea, though they couldn’t say why. I called my malpractice insurer and spoke with counsel there. I was told that they knew of no cases of litigation related to e-mail communications between physicians, and suggested that I stop speaking to lawyers. The MPS proceeded with the listserv, and today we have more than 180 members who have posted on more than 550 different topics.

“I used to work in a psychiatric hospital and enjoyed the collegiality and access to such conversations,” wrote Dr. Mark Komrad, a psychiatrist in private practice in Towson, Md. “One of the biggest downsides of leaving that environment and spending the majority of my week in a private solo office, without even a secretary, was the lack of that collegiality.... The listserve lets me once again enjoy the breadth of more free-wheeling, collegial, dialogue that has dramatically expanded the compass of my working experience.”

“It serves my needs in so many ways” Dr. Komrad continued, “including informal consultations on difficult cases, learning from the similar queries of others, asking about experiences with certain medications, learning new treatment techniques, and having colleagues reflect on the ethical implications of certain clinical approaches, and similarly reflect on their queries.” Finally, Dr. Komrad noted he enjoys, “speculating with others about psychiatric dimensions of certain events in the news, and discussing and debating controversial issues in the profession.”

Listservs for psychiatrists are not breaking news: the APA has one, and Ivan Goldberg has run a large psychopharmacology bulletin board for years. Does your district branch have one? Should they?

<[QM—Dinah Miller, M.D.


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Dr. Miller is the co-author of Shrink Rap: Three Psychiatrists Explain Their Work, recently released by Johns Hopkins University Press.

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