Schizophrenia’s Tangled Roots
Jacqui Dillon is an influential person in UK mental health care.<p>This submission starts with a description of her service experience 25 years ago. It&#x27;s clearly an awful experience.<p>But it doesn&#x27;t talk about the things that have changed.<p>People who report sexual abuse are much more likely to be believed. Things aren&#x27;t good, but they&#x27;re much better than they used to be.<p>There are early intervention in psychosis services in some parts of England. (Regional commissioning mean they don&#x27;t exist everywhere). These work with people who have a first episode of psychosis.<p>Very recently there has been a lot of work around perinatal mental health (the Twitter user Rosey - @pndandme runs some Twitter chats and they&#x27;d have lots of info about how good &#x2F; bad services are).<p>Importantly, mental health teams are multidisciplinary teams. That team would include social workers (who have some statutory duties), mental health nurses, occupational therapists, and a psychiatrist. They&#x27;d arrange access to other teams - psychologists, housing advice, debt and benefit advice, employment support, social activity, exercise support. (Not all of these would be &quot;THE NHS&quot;&#x27; see of it would be charities or community interest companies or private companies. They should all be free at the point of delivery).<p>MH Professionals are much more comfortable with &quot;breakout symptoms&quot; - they know that antipsychotic medication has pretty devastating side effects, so they want the patient to be on the minimum needed dose. This might mean that people still have auditory hallucination, but are given support to cope rather than being heavily medicated.<p>The article suggests that many psychiatrists are only there to prescribe meds. That is an important part of their job (they&#x27;re the only ones who can prescribe meds), but there are plenty of doctors who fully accept the &quot;bio psycho social&quot; model, and who focus on the psychological and social factors.<p>The article.makes it sound like none of this is happening.<p>Also, go careful with Lurhman, there are several critiques of that report.