People with schizophrenia often experience psychological distress and anxiety. This can have a knock on impact on the positive (delusions and hallucinations) and negative (apathy, social withdrawal, cognitive impairments) symptoms of schizophrenia. As a result, there’s lots of interest in psychosocial approaches that may help patients relax. These include talking treatments like CBT, as well [read the full story…]
A year ago this week I blogged about a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry that showed the dramatically reduced life expectancy of people with severe mental illness, who on average live 15-20 years less than the rest of the population. Twelve months on and a new study published in the same journal paints an equally [read the full story…]
Personal health budgets will be rolled out to thousands more people across England over the next 18 months. The scheme, which allows patients to choose between standard NHS community care or a budget to spend on services and goods of their choice, has been extensively piloted over the last 3 years and has generally been [read the full story…]
The hallucinations and delusions associated with psychosis can be frightening and may sometimes result in aggressive or violent behaviour. Of course, this can be incredibly challenging for the patient, but it can also be a real test for mental health staff who have to try and minimise the harm that patients do to themselves and others. Haloperidol [read the full story…]
Mind have published a number of resources aimed at improving mental health crisis care, which they say is ‘under-resourced, understaffed and overstreched’. The charity have used Freedom of Information requests to obtain data from mental health trusts, have conducted a survey of nearly 1,000 patients and are also involved in a research project with colleges [read the full story…]
The NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre have published their annual report on drug misuse in adults and children, which this year includes a focus on young adults. Headlines from the report include a 58% rise in hospital admissions for drug poisoning in the last 11 years, and a 23% fall in admissions for drug-related mental [read the full story…]
Pathological gambling is defined by DSM-IV as a disorder of impulse control which includes a preoccupation with gambling, failed attempts to reduce gambling, and restlessness or irritability when prevented from gambling. It is likely to be reclassified as an addictive disorder in DSM-V. Gambling is something that most adults dabble in from time to time. [read the full story…]
Dementia is a huge issue. As our population ages, the incidence of the disease is on the increase and attempts to prevent and treat the condition with drugs have not been as successful as we hoped. A lot of effort has gone into investigating ways in which lifestyle factors such as diet can impact on [read the full story…]
Much of the research about depression in children and adolescents focuses on how to treat the illness during the acute phase. This review from the Cochrane Depression, Anxiety and Neurosis Review Group is more concerned with the ways in which interventions can be used to prevent relapse or recurrence of depressive disorders. The review looks specifically at two [read the full story…]
The Measuring National Well-being programme was set up in 2010 with a focused aim, to ‘develop and publish an accepted and trusted set of National Statistics which help people understand and monitor well-being’. The idea here is that we need to add meaningful economic, social and environmental measures to sit alongside the traditional Gross Domestic [read the full story…]
