For a patient and their loves ones, preparing for an organ transplant is never easy, and the same holds true for someone considering donating an organ. Mount Sinai’s transplant psychiatry program is one of many resources there to help with the process and, in the end, help save lives.
Mount Sinai Transplant is a premier program for organ transplantation, offering comprehensive treatment for patients who desperately need organs such as hearts, lungs, kidneys, and livers. Among the program’s renowned specialists are transplant psychiatrists who are specially trained to help both organ recipients and living donors.
Ambika Yadav, MBBS
“Across the United States, about 100,000 people require an organ transplant. There’s a huge need,” says Ambika Yadav, MBBS, Assistant Professor, Psychiatry, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who specializes in transplant psychiatry, focusing on liver and kidney donors and recipients.
“The goal of transplant psychiatry is to mitigate whatever psychosocial risks exist so we can help as many people as possible get the organs that will save their lives,” she says.
Transplant Psychiatry at Mount Sinai
Mount Sinai’s transplant psychiatrists are based at the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute, where they work closely with other members of the transplant team. They provide a range of services for organ recipients and for living donors who choose to donate a kidney or portion of a liver. Those services include:
- Evaluating a patient’s suitability as a transplant donor or recipient
- Establishing treatment plans for patients with preexisting psychiatric conditions
- Helping patients develop coping skills and manage expectations around organ transplantation
- Managing psychiatric symptoms that can arise as a result of surgery or medication side effects
- Dealing with complicated emotions after transplant
Helping Organ Recipients Prepare for Transplant
All transplant recipients receive an extensive medical and psychosocial evaluation to determine their suitability for transplantation. Typically, a transplant social worker provides the initial psychosocial evaluation. But transplant psychiatrists often get involved to further assess patients and mitigate any risks.
The goal of that assessment isn’t to rule out whether a person is a suitable candidate for a new organ. Rather, the transplant psychiatrists focus on identifying factors that might cause setbacks and find ways to manage those factors.
“Our goal is always to optimize patients for organ transplant. By identifying risks, we can come up with a plan ahead of time so they can get the organ they need and continue to have a life,” Dr. Yadav says.
For example, when patients have diagnoses such as anxiety or depression, psychiatrists can work with them to develop a treatment plan to reduce the risk that symptoms will get in the way of their transplant recovery. Psychiatrists can also come up with plans to support patients with alcohol use disorder or other substance use disorders, a common history among patients with liver failure.
“In those cases, we’ll do a risk assessment of the severity of their substance use disorder and determine how we can best help prevent them from relapsing so they can be good stewards of their new organ,” Dr. Yadav says.
When possible, these meetings happen in an outpatient setting. But in many cases, patients are evaluated for transplant after they become critically ill and so are already in the hospital. “Because Mount Sinai is a major transplant center, many patients are transferred here because they are surgically complicated or otherwise high-risk,” Dr. Yadav says. She and her colleagues meet regularly with hospitalized patients to assess their needs and help them prepare for transplant.
Managing Life After Organ Transplant
Psychiatrists also help people manage issues that arise after an organ transplant. Agitation and delirium can be side effects of surgery, and immunosuppressant medications that prevent organ rejection can cause psychiatric side effects and may also interact with other psychiatric drugs in complicated ways, according to Dr. Yadav.
“Community psychiatrists may not have much experience managing those psychiatric side effects and interactions,” she says. “Once a patient is stabilized after transplant, we can refer them to a community psychiatrist and provide our recommendations for managing their treatment.”
Psychiatrists also help patients deal with complicated emotions following a transplant. Patients might feel guilty or unworthy after receiving an organ from a deceased donor. They may expect life to be completely different after a transplant and feel let down by ongoing medical challenges and other life stressors. “We can help people manage their expectations and find ways to cope,” Dr. Yadav says.
Supporting Living Organ Donors
On the other end, transplant psychiatrists play a key role in assessing living donors and helping them prepare for the procedure. Living organ donors can donate a kidney or a portion of their liver to recipients—including friends and family members, and in some cases, anonymous recipients. Psychiatrists screen patients for preexisting psychological conditions that could affect their decision and well-being, and ensure they understand the risks they’re taking.
Increasingly, living donors contribute kidneys in “paired exchanges”—for example, a donor who is not a match for his wife may donate to a stranger on the waiting list, while someone related to that stranger donates to the first man’s wife. Such paired exchanges can involve multiple steps of exchanges. “Given the intricacies and the many points at which things might not go as planned, we hold these patients to a higher standard and make sure they know what to expect,” Dr. Yadav says.
Donating an organ is a big decision. “These are people who are completely healthy, undertaking a surgical procedure with zero benefit to themselves,” Dr. Yadav says. Mount Sinai’s transplant programs go above and beyond to keep living donors’ well-being at the forefront. “Our living donor team is really special. They put the donor first, and always prioritize their needs separate from the needs of the organ recipient,” she adds.
Moving Transplant Psychiatry Forward
Dr. Yadav and her colleagues are also engaged in research to improve their approach to assessing patients and mitigating psychosocial risks.
“As a major transplant center, Mount Sinai has many complicated cases and we have a lot of data regarding our risk assessments and patients’ psychosocial outcomes,” she says. “We’re always trying to use data to come up with better assessment tools and ultimately improve outcomes for patients.”
Transplant psychiatry is a subspecialty of the Consultation Liaison Psychiatry services at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Learn more about Mount Sinai Transplant and Living Donor Transplantation.