Money alone will not solve the problems within Mental Health Care Systems. We need a radical shift in the understanding, training, outlook and organisation of our society as a whole, each individual and every health service and professional. Paul Kirby writes about this comprehensively and optimistically. He points out failings and offers transformational solutions. Here are some excerpts:
“The medicalisation of mental health assumes that doctors can solve medical problems on their own, in the way that they do for physical illness with biomedical testing, drugs and surgery. That is rarely true in mental health where getting better relies significantly on the patient’s own therapeutic actions and their interaction with their friends, family and colleagues. Outpatient psychiatric care rarely works with the other people in the patient’s life, dealing with the patient one-to-one. Worse still, medical ethics prevent doctors discussing their adult patients, even vulnerable eighteen year olds, with their family and friends.
England, like other countries, has only ten per cent of the inpatient places, per head of population, that it had in the 1950s. The US has even less. It wasn’t just the asylums closing. England has halved the number of inpatient places it still had in 1998. Community-based crisis services have not worked well. Only fourteen per cent of English patients who’ve experienced a mental health crisis felt they had appropriate care and there are no English community services rated as good. In the absence of appropriate inpatient care, people who are severely ill are labelled, and dealt with, as non-medical problems, as criminals, as homeless, as addicts, as a public nuisance and as suicides.”
Doctors tell people that anti-depressants have a positive effect on half of the people who take them. That is true, but misleading. Even drug companies only claim that their drugs have a positive impact on one in eight people who take them. Drug companies are also clear that the beneficial effects of the drugs take two to six months to kick-in. Without medication, a third of people with depression are better after three months and two-thirds are better after six months. For the people who do benefit, these drugs are probably best compared to a band-aid, increasing the natural healing process a little.
A minority appear to be greatly harmed by taking anti-depressants, with a doubling of the suicide rate for people with depression and the triggering of psychosis in significant numbers of people. But the biggest harm of the anti-depressant accident is that their domination of psychiatric care has crowded out better and more varied solutions to common disorders and left millions unable to get well again.
Mental illness and poor health are often based on underlying feelings that one has lost autonomy and/or community-connectedness, experienced as helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, isolation and dehumanisation. These are social problems that have medical consequences. The best solutions are, often, therefore social rather than medical. In terms of physical health, many of the biggest achievements have come from non-medical solutions. We live longer and better in large part due to clean air, safe water, better vehicle and workplace safety, less tobacco smoking, more and better food, fluoridated water. We need a similar public health approach for the social causes of mental health issues.”
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