Emergence of bariatric psychiatry as a new subspecialty

Abstract

Bariatric surgery is the branch of surgery aimed at helping a person with obesity lose weight. The implementation of surgical treatment of obesity is growing at an impressive rate. As expected, the expanding implementation of bariatric procedures has progressively revealed critical issues that were not evident when the number of obese patients treated with surgery was relatively small. One critical issue is the importance of mental health assessment and care of bariatric patients. The aim of this review is to provide readers with an up-to-date summary of the goals, methods, and clinical strategies of bariatric psychiatry. The aims can be grouped into three distinct categories. First, to ascertain that there are no psychiatric contraindications to safe bariatric surgery. Second, to diagnose and treat pre-surgery mental conditions that could predict poor weight loss. Third, to diagnose and treat post-surgery mental conditions associated with poor quality of life. Although bariatric psychiatry has gained the status of a new subspecialty within the field of mental health and psychopathology, many clinical questions remain unsolved. We need more long-term data on outcome measures such as quality of life, adherence to behavioral guidelines, risk of suicide, and post-surgery prevalence of psychological disturbances and mental disorders.

Keywords: Bariatric surgery; Mental health; Postoperative follow-up; Preoperative assessment; Psychiatry; Quality of life; Weight loss.