Drug non-compliance in mania : the Indian experience

A prominent relationship has been proposed between compliance and various factors, like the patient's individual characteristics, the illness and medication being prescribed to the patient. We compared 20 manic patients who were non compliant to medication with a control group, who were matched on the demographic variable, illness variables and the treatment prescribed. We first examined the reason for non compliance from the patient's perspective, and found out the commonest reason for non compliance to be 'side effect of the medicines' (35.0%), followed by the sense of 'feeling well' (30.0%). On assessing the patient's personality traits using 16PF, we found significant elevation on factor L, signifying characteristics like pretension, jealousy, suspiciousness etc. On the DMI, the patients got significantly lower scores on the variable PRN - indicating less use of defenses like inteilectualization and rationalization. Based on these findings we came to the conclusion that noncompiiant patients use less of mature defenses and more of primitive defenses.