Hospice care relies on a variety of approaches to heal the mind and the soul, if not the body. While hospice care has been well developed in the United States and the United Kingdom, it has overlooked the crucial tool of psychiatry in responding to the mental health needs of dying residents. Many of the psychiatrist's roles are being handled by social workers, psychologists, and volunteers who are not trained to provide a deeper understanding of the complex picture of organic brain dysfunction, side effects of medical or psychiatric drugs, and psychiatric effects of opportunistic infections or cancers. Psychiatrists are trained to evaluate both the physical and psychiatric pieces of the whole patient picture, enabling a more precise understanding of the effects of dementia, grief, opportunistic infections, substance abuse, HIV treatment, and psychopharmacologic agents. The Psychiatrists Concerned About AIDS organization is working to overcome the exclusion of psychiatrists from acute and palliative care, and thus, resolve the split between psychiatry and hospice care.

Relationships among death anxiety, disclosure behaviors, and attitudes of oncologists toward terminal care were examined by means of a questionnaire responded to by ninety-nine members of the Oncology Society of New Jersey. Death anxiety scores were lower for oncologists than typically reported for physicians in general. Oncologists with low death anxiety scores related to dying patients more effectively than oncologists with high death anxiety scores. Short-term repeated exposure to dying patients resulted in comfort with dying patients while long-term repeated exposure resulted in discomfort. Disclosure to patients' families was clearly a more frequently reported behavior than disclosure to the patient. Oncologists who did not always disclose a terminal prognosis to the patient reported difficulty with disclosure, tried to avoid direct disclosure, and were not as comfortable with dying patients as with other patients.