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Mental-health drugs: It's all in the game
Tuesday, September 05, 2000 By Christopher Snowbeck, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Many mental health problems can be treated successfully with medicines, but patients often stop taking the drugs because of their side effects.
A new program developed by a nurse and a behavioral therapist in Ohio helps hospitals teach patients about these side effects and other medicine issues in hopes that patients equipped with knowledge will do a better job of taking their medicines.
The program, called the Psychotropic Med Ed Game, uses competition to help the lessons about medicine go down.
The game splits patients into two competing groups and asks the teams to complete any of three games. One game asks patients to answer multiple-choice questions. Another has patients filling out a crossword puzzle in which the clues are questions about medicines. The third game, called Shout Out, lets patients shout as many possible answers to a question as they can in a given amount of time.
Rodney Carson is a behavioral therapist from Sharpsville, Mercer County, who works at Northside Medical Center in Youngstown. He and Catherine McClain, a registered nurse originally from New Castle, Lawrence County, introduced the game last year.
"It's a game that saves lives because it educates the psychiatric patients about adverse drug interactions and side effects," said Carson. "They learn their medicines and have fun doing it at the same time."
So far, 16 hospitals and treatment facilities in Ohio have purchased the game and are using it in drug education classes, which all hospitals offer to psychiatric patients, in part because they are required to do so by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
Mary Brown, a nurse at the River Bend Treatment Center in Warren, Ohio, used to teach patients about their medicines through a simple group discussion. But this spring she began using the Med Ed game with patients staying in the 12-bed, short-term residential treatment facility.
Patients enjoy the excitement of the game, Brown said.
"One reason that a lot of the clients don't continue to take their medications is because of the way it makes them feel, and if they ever have a severe side effect it can scare them out of taking it," she said. One of the goals of the game is to "teach them that there are medications they can take to stop side effects."
Vince Mercuri, a behavioral health coordinator at St. Francis Medical Center, said he hadn't seen the Med Ed game but was intrigued by the concept. St. Francis offers patients lectures, films and group discussions to teach about medicines. The hospital also has something called a Medication Education Station, where every month or so the hospital provides in-depth information on a mental health medicine.
"People can get threatened and put off when there is too much information to handle or it's too boring," Mercuri said. "But with a game, there's going to be some enthusiasm and some energy."
"Mental illness is a very treatable disease, but the problem is patient compliance," he said. "That's why patient education is so important. So, any kind of patient education tool would be welcomed."
Frank A. Ghinaffi, chief of adult services at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, said his hospital sometimes uses games to teach pediatric patients about medicines and other mental health issues. But the idea of using a game to help adult patients learn is different, he said.
"This sounds unique in the sense that they've formalized it," Ghinaffi said. "It sounds like they've created a format that would be easily used by other people."
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