'Bradley died in his sleep because of polypharmacy—the layering of multiple medications on top of one another, often without regard to what other doctors have already prescribed or the potential interactions between the drugs.' 📝 Andrea Sonnenberg
And then there is the problem of communication and coordination of care. A psychiatric patient’s care is often so fragmented and piecemeal that the psychiatrist managing the patient’s medication does not coordinate care with the patient’s therapist or determine what medication the patient’s healthcare providers have already prescribed. At one point I asked Bradley’s psychiatrist why he was on two medications that treated the same condition.
Too often, patients and their families are left to untangle the treatment process by themselves, jumping from one crisis to the next, addressing emergencies, but not doing the more painstaking work of addressing the deeper root causes. Besides a good match with a mental health professional, there needs to be a medication “quarterback”—someone who helps to coordinate care. Unfortunately, I found that coordinated and integrated care is the exception, not the rule, in the mental health field.
I’m not a mental health professional, a lobbyist, or a drug company executive. I am just a grieving mother advocating for solutions to prevent others from suffering the way we did. Since my son’s death I have dedicated my life to helping others with mental health issues and most specifically to avoid polypharmacy deaths. In 2019, my husband and I started the Bradley Sonnenberg Wellness Initiative partnering with USC Hillel to bring therapy and wellness programming to college students.
As a result of doing this work, here are some things I’ve learned: We must demand the use of evidence-based treatments in lieu of simply prescribing multiple medications. These include Cognitive and Didactical Behavioral Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing , and mindfulness training.
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