Motivational pharmacotherapy: combining motivational interviewing and antidepressant therapy to improve treatment...

Treatment non-adherence in psycho-pharmacotherapy remains a significant challenge to the effective clinical management of psychiatric disorders, especially among underserved racial/ethnic groups. This article introduces motivational pharmacotherapy, an approach that integrates motivational interviewing into psycho-pharmacotherapy sessions in order to increase treatment adherence. We describe what aspects of motivational interviewing were incorporated into motivational pharmacotherapy and how we tailored the intervention to the clinical and cultural characteristics of monolingual Spanish-speaking immigrants with major depressive disorder. Transcriptions of the interactions between psychiatrists and patients help illustrate this approach. In our experience, motivational pharmacotherapy differs substantially from standard pharmacotherapy in how it recasts clinicians and patients as equal experts, prioritizes patients' motivation to engage in treatment rather than clinicians' multiple inquiries about symptoms, encourages patients' self-efficacy to overcome barriers, and attends to the momentum of patients' language about commitment to change. We also found that motivational pharmacotherapy can be feasibly incorporated into medication treatment, can be tailored to patients' culture and disorder, and may help increase adherence to psycho-pharmacotherapy.