Patients' reasons for not presenting emotional problems in general practice consultations.

John D. Cape · Y McCulloch

118 citations0/0 files storedEurope PMC (PubMed Central)

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Mental Health Treatment and Access Patient-Provider Communication in Healthcare Primary Care and Health Outcomes

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Patients commonly do not mention emotional problems in consultations, and this is a factor in general practitioners' (GPs') difficulty in identifying psychological morbidity. AIM: To investigate patients' self-reported reasons for not disclosing psychological problems in consultations with GPs. METHOD: From nine general practices, a sample of patients with high General Health Questionnaire scores, who planned to present only somatic symptoms to the GP, were interviewed after their consultation with the GP. The interview covered their reasons for not mentioning emotional problems. A patient satisfaction questionnaire was administered. RESULTS: A total of 83 patients were interviewed. Sixty-four patients confirmed that they had not mentioned emotional problems in the consultation; 23 (36%) of these gave primarily realistic reasons for not presenting emotional problems (e.g. able to cope with distress), 29 (45%) gave reasons related to psychological embarrassment or hesitation to trouble the GP, and 12 (19%) were mainly deterred by the doctors' interview behaviours. The latter group had significantly lower satisfaction scores than patients in the other two groups. In addition, patients in all groups commonly reported perceptions of lack of time (48%) and that there is nothing doctors can do to help (39%) as barriers to mentioning emotional problems. CONCLUSION: An understanding of patients' reasons for not disclosing emotional problems can assist in identifying subgroups of patients with different management needs.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 118 citations exist upstream.

References

1988A user's guide to the General Health Questionnaire 1997The National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association Consensus Statement on the Undertreatment of Depression 1992Common mental disorders : a bio-social model 1982Mental Illness in the Community: The Pathway to Psychiatric Care.1991Recognition, Management, and Course of Anxiety and Depression in General Practice 1995Nondetection of depression by primary care physicians reconsidered 1997Competing demands in psychosocial care 1985Unrecognised depression in general practice.

Cited by

2001A qualitative study of patients' views on anxiety and depression.2010Relational barriers to depression help-seeking in primary care 2020Personality Disorders in Older Adults: a Review of Epidemiology, Assessment, and Treatment 2012How patients understand depression associated with chronic physical disease – a systematic review 2012Health Care Avoidance among People with Serious Psychological Distress: Analyses of 2007 Health Information National Trends Survey

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.