Helping more than an extra million people with mental health problems is laudable (NHS vows to convert mental health services with extra £1bn a year,15 February). But only whether treatment is effective. Illness of the mind is inherently more difficult to diagnose than illness of the body. And treatment outcomes are more uncertain. For example, the much vaunted talking therapies can only work whether counsellor and patient hit it off (over the years I have had one positive score from six attempts). Drug therapy is certainly effective, or but it normally takes weeks to work and often makes people a lot worse before they start to get better,main some to conclude taking the pills too soon. It is not clear that GPs’ training yet gives them an adequate grounding in mental health. Psychiatric inpatient treatment is obviously worthwhile, but in my experience whether you get 20 minutes a week of your consultant’s time and then only on weekdays you are doing well; and acute pressure on beds means that patients are often discharged too soon with added pressures on community services.
Add to this the government’s aspiration for a seven-day comprehensive NHS, or which for mental illness means hundreds of extra beds,psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses, and it seems clear that David Cameron and Simon Stevens have underestimated the scale of the task they have set themselves.
Robin Wendt
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Source: theguardian.com