List members who haven’t seen it will be interested to watch a recording of a presentation by Chris Gordon, a psychiatrist from Advocates, in Framingham, Massachusetts, and the service manager Brenda Miele Soares there, who have been implementing Open dialogue in dedicated crisis service and recovery services over the past five years: http://nswmentalhealthcommission.com.au/news/our-news/forum-on-open-dialogue-crisis-care
And here is a post from a Sydney GP highly crititical about the Hearing Voices approach to voices for a number of reasons, mainly to do with skepticism about the value of neuroleptic medication as the mainstay in treatment for psychosis by supporters of the HV approach. Some may want to respond the these criticisms, perhaps with anecdotal reports of the value of the HV approach… http://www.healthed.com.au/hearing-voices-network/
Readers of the ISPS journal Psychosis will have seen the current paper by Jones & Lehrmanm which explores the differential contents and phenomenology of experiences seem to be too often lumped together as "auditory hallucinations". This type of work seems so much more valuable than the opinion expressed in the healthed.com.au site above. The abstract for the Jones & Lerhmann paper is available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17522439.2015.1100670
APRHA registered heath practitioners can register and access this article on the Medical Observer web site – 7 messages for GPs from mental health patients. These are hardly surprising, but the comments from GPs relate to the time it would take to respond to these…
1. The prescription pad should not be reached for too quickly. Non-pharmacological options such as counselling, cognitive behaviour therapy and exercise should be offered first.
2. Side effects must be part of up-front discussions about treatment options.
3. The potential for sexual side effects should be discussed openly and honestly to help alleviate unnecessary shame.
4. Better understanding is needed if a patient decides to go off their medication.
5. Every general practice should have a practice nurse who has experience in mental health.
6. Patients should not be made to feel like a failure if their condition d oes not improve.
7. GPs should have regular conversations with patients about how their medication is going and whether there is the possibility of safely reducing or ceasing the medication.
These are links to the NIMH web site of interest, the first two referring the RAISE project discussed here recently, with more modern views about psychosis, but unfortunately (as in many large organisations) the older messages, as in the last link, remain – no wonder clinicians families and otrhers are confused and complain about missed messages…
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/schizophrenia/raise/raise-questions-and-answers.shtml
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/schizophrenia/raise/what-is-psychosis.shtml
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/schizophrenia.html
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Best Wishes
Philip BenjaminMHN BEd MMind&Soc
(+61) 0418 887 007
(+44) 0748 270 0287
"Dreaming is free", Blondie, 1979
Psychosis Links 