Patient's trust in their psychiatrist: a cross-sectional survey

Investigating and characterizing the degree and correlates of patient's trust in their treating psychiatrists across a range of psychiatric disorders is of a great clinical relevance to enhance our therapeutic alliance, which has not been addressed in the literature. In this study, outpatients who visited one of the participating psychiatric clinics in Tokyo, Japan between October and November, 2010 were asked to complete the Trust in Physician Scale (TPS), an 11-item self-report questionnaire. A univariate general linear model was used to examine the effects of the following variables on the TPS total score: age, sex, diagnosis, Global Assessment of Functioning score, educational background, physician's years of practice as a psychiatrist, duration of treatment with their current psychiatrists, sex concordance between patients and their psychiatrists, and whether patients were older than their psychiatrists. Five hundred and four patients were enrolled (mean ± SD age = 42.8 ± 13.6 years; 176 men; Psychiatric diagnoses (ICD-10): F0 [N = 8], F2 [N = 72], F3 [N = 252], F4 [N = 147], F6 [N = 22]). A duration of treatment with their current psychiatrist of ≥ 1 year and a duration of their physician's clinical expertise as a psychiatrist for ≥ 10 years were associated with a greater degree of patient's trust in their psychiatrist. Furthermore, patients with a F3 diagnosis showed a significantly higher TPS total score than those with F4. These findings underscore an importance of paying close attention to patients who are relatively new and are not treated by well-experienced psychiatrists in terms of subjective trust. Furthermore, this likely holds more true for patients with neurotic disorders.