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Mental health care ‐ let's focus on the person, not the disease
Author(s) -
Walton Ian
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
progress in neurology and psychiatry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.19
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1931-227X
pISSN - 1367-7543
DOI - 10.1002/pnp.133
Subject(s) - blame , active listening , credibility , mental health , psychology , focus (optics) , health care , work (physics) , nursing , social psychology , public relations , medicine , psychiatry , psychotherapist , political science , law , mechanical engineering , physics , optics , engineering
When something does not work, we have a tendency to believe we just need to do more of the same, ie try harder. Mental health treatment is an example of this. When our patients fail to heed what we are saying, we often blame them for not listening, instead of asking why they are not compliant to our best intentions. The reality is that, for our patients and society in general, we lack credibility, as there is a general belief that treatments for mental health problems do not work. We reinforce this by maintaining people in secondary care services, rather than actively working to discharge them back into primary care services and the community. Copyright © 2009 Wiley Interface Ltd