Enhancing learning and teaching about mental health across the disciplines
What would we give for a treatment for first-episode psychosis that led to a 90% reduction in the diagnosis of schizophrenia? In Western Lapland the mental health system achieves this with Open Dialogue, not drugs.
I've just finished watching Daniel Mackler's film, Open Dialogue and strongly recommend it for using in mental health teaching. Below is the blurb from the back of the video and it can be bought from wildtruth.net.
From the DVD:
In the far north of Finland, a stone’s throw from the Arctic Circle, a group of innovative family therapists converted the area’s traditional mental health system, which once boasted some of Europe’s poorest outcomes for schizophrenia, into one that now gets the best statistical results in the world for first-break psychosis. They call their approach Open Dialogue.
Their principles, though radical in this day and age of multi-drug cocktails and involuntary hospitalizations, are surprisingly simple. They meet clients in crisis immediately and often daily until the crises are resolved. They avoid hospitalization and its consequential stigma, preferring to meet in the homes of those seeking their services. And, perhaps most controversially, they avoid the use of anti-psychotic medication wherever possible.
They also work in groups, because they view psychosis as a problem involving relationships. They include in the treatment process the families and social networks of those seeking their help, and their clinicians work in teams, not as isolated, sole practitioners. Additionally, their whole approach values of the voice of everyone in the process, most especially the person directly in crisis. And finally, they provide their services, which operate within the context of Finnish socialized medicine, for free.
Open Dialogue weaves together interviews with psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, and journalists to create both a powerful vision of medication-free recovery and a hard-hitting critique of traditional psychiatry.
NB There is a trailer here:
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Posted by Jill Anderson on December 1, 2020 at 11:50 0 Comments 0 Likes
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh is launching the world’s first master’s degree in Mad Studies. The MSc Mad Studies course is primarily a course for graduates with lived experience of mental health issues. It has been hailed by a leading international Mad Studies academic as the most exciting piece of curriculum development in the last 20 years!
Mad Studies is a recognised academic discipline that explores the knowledge and actions that have grown…
ContinuePosted by Jill Anderson on October 26, 2020 at 19:00 0 Comments 0 Likes
Medical discourse currently dominates as the defining framework for madness in educational praxis. Consequently, ideas rooted in a mental health/illness binary abound in higher learning, as both curriculum content and through institutional procedures that reinforce structures of normalcy. While madness, then, is included in university spaces, this inclusion proceeds in ways that continue to pathologize madness and disenfranchise mad people.
This paper offers Mad…
ContinuePosted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:48 0 Comments 0 Likes
Earlier this year, UUK published a refreshed version of its strategic framework, Stepchange: mentally healthy universities, calling on universities to prioritise the mental health of their students and staff by taking a whole university approach to mental health.
The Stepchange approach and shared set of principles inform the …
ContinuePosted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:44 0 Comments 0 Likes
Three sample articles are available on the Asylum website:
Beyond the Pale – Raza Griffiths
An Illustrated Mind – Kathryn Watson …
ContinuePosted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:41 0 Comments 0 Likes
Fast-track mental health social work provider Think Ahead will expand its intake by 60% from next year following a government funding boost of at least £18m.
The Department of Health and Social Care has agreed a contract with Think Ahead to increase the number of trainees for its 2021 and 2022 cohorts from 100 to 160, with…
ContinuePosted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:39 0 Comments 0 Likes
Health Education England has commissioned 11 videos centered on real-life experience of specialists in the social work field.
Posted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:37 0 Comments 0 Likes
In February 2020 Health Education England and Skills for Care put on two major conferences about the role and development of mental health social work.
Posted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:33 0 Comments 0 Likes
A section of the Skills for Care website has been developed for mental health social workers and AMHPs
Posted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:29 1 Comment 1 Like
Social workers are among the largest group of professionals in the mental health workforce and play a key role in the assessment of mental health, addictions and suicide. Most social workers provide services to individuals with mental health concerns, yet there are gaps in research on social work education and training programmes. The objective of this open access scoping review is to examine literature on social work education and training in mental health, addictions and…
ContinuePosted by Jill Anderson on October 16, 2020 at 15:25 0 Comments 0 Likes
With World Mental Health Day this Saturday, a new Nuffield Trust report discusses how more people might be attracted to apply to study mental health nursing, and the reasons why they might currently be less likely to do so.
Co-author Claudia Leone picks out some key findings.
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