Keeping you up to date with reliable mental health research, policy & guidance
The successful transition from inpatient to outpatient psychiatric care is an important step along the road to recovery. It can be a difficult and turbulent time for patients, so much so that there is a risk that patients will suffer a relapse of their illness and need to be readmitted into hospital (Herman, Mattke, Somekh [read the full story...]
Good mental health care should involve the patient in determining their treatment, and should involve the least restrictive form of care possible. Although the Care Programme Approach (CPA) has resulted in patients in England routinely participating in planning their care, compulsory admissions to psychiatric hospitals have continued to rise over the past decade. Involuntary treatment [read the full story...]
Community treatment orders (CTO’s) provide compulsory supervision outside of psychiatric hospital. They require patients to accept clinical monitoring in the community and enable them to be recalled to hospital for assessment if necessary. They do not authorise forcible treatment; however whilst on a CTO a patient may be ordered to meet certain requirements, such as [read the full story...]
Some days even the most committed of Elves can be a little reluctant to return to work in the woodland. What must it be like though to feel like that every day? Apathy (diminished motivation, lack of emotion, interest or concern) is thought to be a frequent complication of stroke associated with poorer outcomes, but [read the full story...]
The literature on the efficacy of psychological treatments for excessive drinking is vast, but investigations into effectiveness of these treatments in individuals with other clinical diagnoses are considerably more limited. A recent paper published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica reviewed the effectiveness of manual guided treatments for excessive alcohol consumption in individuals with a psychotic disorder. [read the full story...]
There is a limited amount of good quality research being published about bipolar disorder, particularly investigating the early stages. Bipolar is associated with a high risk of relapse and this risk of relapse increases with the number of previous episodes. Observational studies suggest that early intervention may improve both course and outcome, but currently progression [read the full story...]
Schizophrenia according to the NICE guidelines, is a relatively common illness and in the majority of cases takes a chronic course, requiring continued management and careful attention. In the treatment and management of schizophrenia, antipsychotic medications – like olanzapine, quetiapine or clozapine – are the first line intervention. Antipsychotics can be loosely divided into “first-generation” (“typical”) and [read the full story...]
Recent work by Suzanne Fitzpatrick and colleagues from Heriot Watt University has investigated the experiences of people who are affected by what they call multiple exclusion homelessness; a combination of homelessness, substance misuse, ‘street’ activities such as begging and street drinking, and institutional care (e.g. prison). Their quantitative survey shows that there is considerable overlap [read the full story...]
Last September I blogged about a cohort study in the Lancet that highlighted the links between self-harm and poor physical health. This same dataset (drawn from over 30,000 patients from 6 hospitals in Oxford, Manchester and Derby from 2000-7) has now spawned a longitudinal study published in the European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry journal. This [read the full story...]
Mind have published a number of resources aimed at improving mental health crisis care, which they say is ‘under-resourced, understaffed and overstreched’. The charity have used Freedom of Information requests to obtain data from mental health trusts, have conducted a survey of nearly 1,000 patients and are also involved in a research project with colleges [read the full story...]
