Impact of interpreter use on psychiatric treatment, care access requires further study

Key takeaways:

• One relevant systematic review exists from the last 20 years.
• The impact of interpreters on psychiatric diagnosis, treatment and care for patients with limited English proficiency remains largely unknown.

NEW YORK — Additional research concerning the impact of using interpreters for psychiatric care for patients with limited English proficiency is needed, according to a poster presented at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting.

Maria Sarmiento, DO, chief resident at UMass Chan Medical School-Baystate, told Healio she was inspired to conduct this study alongside Deepika Sundararaj, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UMass Chan Medical School-Baystate, after witnessing interpreters work firsthand as a bilingual individual.

“There’s a lot [lost] in translation because in psychiatry we use a lot of language,” Sarmiento said. “So we’re misdiagnosing, especially psychosis and bipolar disorder, because of what’s lost in translation. I went back and looked at all the research and there’s not a lot of research on this topic in psychiatry.”

Considering the growing diversity of the U.S. population and that approximately 8% of people aged 5 years or older have limited English proficiency (LEP), data that reflect the impact of interpreter utilization is crucial, according to the researchers. This research is particularly significant within psychiatry, where language is key to understanding a patient’s history, mental status, perceptions, thought processes and more, they added.

In the study, Sarmiento and Sundararaj aimed to review all the literature from the last 20 years concerning how the use of interpreters affects psychiatric diagnosis and patients’ experiences. They used PubMed and PsycINFO to perform a systematic search from January 2003 to August 2023 with a focus on interpreter use for psychiatric treatment in patients with LEP.

The researchers initially obtained 33 citations, but only eight met the inclusion criteria. Of the articles that had been published, there was only one systematic review from 2010 that examined this issue. The other articles examined related topics such as how LEP can act as a barrier to accessing mental health services, the impact of interpreters on therapeutic relationships and using interpreters in psychotherapy.

Sarmiento and Sundararaj concluded that research on the impact of using interpreters for psychiatric treatment and diagnosis for patients with LEP has been limited over the last 20 years. Sarmiento was surprised at the lack of research on this topic, “because in psychiatry we use language for everything,” she told Healio.

Given the importance of language in accurate psychiatric treatment, diagnosis and access to care as well as the growing diversity of the population, which will lead to increased demand for interpreters for LEP patients, further research is needed to determine interpreter impact, according to the researchers.