Predictors of patient communication in psychiatric medication encounters among veterans with serious mental illnesses.

Objective: Person-centered psychiatric services rely on consumers actively sharing personal information, opinions, and preferences with their providers. This research examined predictors of consumer communication during appointments for psychiatric medication prescriptions.

Methods: The Roter Interaction Analysis System was used to code recorded Veterans Affairs psychiatric appointments with 175 consumers and 21 psychiatric medication prescribers and categorize communication by purpose: biomedical, psychosocial, facilitation, or rapport-building.

Results: Regression analyses found that greater provider communication, symptomology, orientation to psychiatric recovery, and functioning on the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status Attention and Language indices, as well as consumer diagnostic label, were positive predictors of consumer communication, though the types of communication impacted varied.

Conclusions And Implications For Practice: Provider communication is the easiest variable to intervene on to create changes in consumer communication. Future research should also consider how cognitive and symptom factors may impact specific types of consumer communication in order to identify subgroups for targeted interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record