Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry is an ABPN board-certified subspecialty of psychiatry.
Consultation-Liaison (C-L) psychiatrists are at the forefront of integrated medical and psychiatric practice.
C-L psychiatrists provide expert psychiatric care for patients with complex medical conditions to all inpatient and outpatient primary care and specialty services. They provide care:
- Directly through consultation with patients
- As members of interdisciplinary teams by communicating and collaborating with medical and surgical colleagues (i.e., liaison services) to optimize patient care
Some examples of the ways C-L psychiatrists can have a major impact on people’s lives are:
- Instituting behavioral interventions and reducing polypharmacy for an elderly individual with post-operative delirium
- Discovering a critical drug-drug interaction that led to the development of serotonin syndrome when an antibiotic was prescribed for a wound infection
- Rapidly reversing catatonia that emerged during an exacerbation of systemic lupus erythematosus
- Providing life-saving treatment with ECT to a new mother who developed delusional beliefs and intent to kill her infant and herself
- Helping patients and their care teams manage chronic pain and somatic symptoms
- Delivering psychotherapy to a woman with recurrent depression who received a mastectomy for stage 3 breast cancer and is undergoing radiation therapy
- Addressing trauma and avoidance symptoms to promote engagement in care in an outpatient clinic providing medical care for refugees
- Leading team-based care for a population of people with depression or anxiety in a community health center
