Joint Crisis Plans: empowering service users with psychotic disorders

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Raphael Underwood reports on a thematic analysis of joint crisis plans, which explores what service users with psychotic disorders want in a mental health crisis or relapse.

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Fewer patients kill themselves in mental health units, but there are bigger benefits to home care

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Suicides among mental health patients under home treatment are double the number of suicides in inpatient units, according to a new study published in The Lancet Psychiatry which looks at suicide rates in different mental health settings.

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New mental health commissioning guides from JCPMH

Some doctors are reluctant to talk to patients about reducing their use of prescription drugs, even if they know there is no longer a medical reason for continued use.

Those lovely people at the Joint Commissioning Panel for Mental Health (JCP-MH) have published four new guides to help those of you involved in commissioning community specialist services, older people’s services, inpatient and crisis home treatment and services for people with learning disabilities. These guides are short (around 20 pages), readable and nicely summarised with ten [read the full story…]

Mind publish report to help mental health commissioners improve crisis care services

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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…]

How can we help people with borderline personality disorder who are in crisis? New Cochrane review is inconclusive

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Borderline personality disorder (BPD) affects our mood and our ability to interact with others. It’s one of the most common personality disorders, affecting around 2% of the population. People with BPD often have other mental health conditions such as substance misuse problems, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders or other personality disorders. Many people with [read the full story…]

Mobile crisis teams reduce hospital admissions for serious mental illness, according to updated Cochrane review

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‘Crisis intervention’ and ‘home-care packages’ are provided in the community to help people who are going through an acute phase of severe mental illness. The Cochrane Schizophrenia Group have updated their review on this topic by conducting their usual robust and systematic search for randomised controlled trials of crisis intervention models versus standard care for [read the full story…]

New study finds no evidence that crisis resolution and home treatment teams have any impact on psychiatric admissions

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Crisis resolution and home treatment (CRHT) teams were introduced in England throughout 2000 and 2001 and a number of studies have been published since then which have shown that they are associated with reductions in inpatient admissions. This new study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry used data from a previous national study for 229 [read the full story…]