Mark Horowitz summarises the new WHO and UCL Institute of Health Equity (Michael Marmot) report and research paper on social determinants of mental health. He concludes that it’s time to focus on the root causes of mental distress, namely poverty, unemployment, poor education and social isolation.
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Joe Judge appraises a recent systematic review and meta-analysis looking at the duration of untreated psychosis as a predictor of long-term outcomes in schizophrenia.
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Stephen Wood summarises a recent cluster RCT of vocational rehabilitation in early psychosis, which finds that early intervention services need to do more to help young people with psychosis return to work.
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Elena Marcus writes her debut blog on a total population study that finds some interesting associations between bipolar disorder and leadership potential, executive roles and political professions.
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In 2000, the Scottish Executive published ‘The same as you?’ a ten year programme to meet the needs of people with learning disabilities in Scotland. Following a two year review, last year they published a new ten year strategy, known as ‘The keys to life – Improving Quality of Life for People with Learning Disabilities’, [read the full story…]
A short while ago, we posted about the reflections of mentors in a programme in Australia aimed at helping older people get connected to and take part in community groups. The paper we are posting about today draws on data from that project. The researchers developed the project in the context of increasing numbers of [read the full story…]
The publication of Valuing People Now in 2009 signalled a renewed focus on delivery of the key objectives of the 2001 White Paper. To reinforce this focus, the Government introduced two self-assessment frameworks for health and local authorities to complete. We have posted previously about the progress of partnership boards using this framework Method The [read the full story…]
Mental health in the workplace is an area that we’ve blogged about a few times before. This blog features a recent review by Tan et al on workplace interventions for depression. Mental disorders are the leading cause of sickness absence (Harvey, 2009 and Henderson, 2011), and depression in particular is predicted to be the leading [read the full story…]
The effects of the global stock market crash of 2008 have not just been economic. The health and social consequences of the financial crisis are becoming clearer over time and were anticipated by public health academics early on. Based on a 30 year review of EU data on how economic changes affect mortality, in 2009 [read the full story…]
In the UK it is a shocking statistic that around 80-90% of people with severe mental illness are not in work. Unemployment impacts negatively not only on the individual, but is also costly to the government. Employment is now embedded in key mental health policy as a central part of recovery. However, despite this, and [read the full story…]
