Employment opportunities for all? Social enterprises and mental health

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Martin Webber considers a Canadian study about social enterprises and employment opportunities for people with mental health problems such as psychosis.

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‘Beat the cheat’: disability welfare benefits and newspaper reporting

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Gerry Bennison offers food for thought in his blog on research into how disability welfare has been characterised in popular UK tabloid articles.

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Shirkers and scroungers: Is there a link between mental health discrimination and welfare reform?

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In her first Social Care Elf blog, Sarah Carr looks at an evaluation of the Time to Change anti-stigma campaign and discovers some new findings on discrimination against those living with mental health problems.

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NICE multimorbidity guidance almost excluded people with learning disabilities

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The NICE scoping guidelines on multimorbidity now thankfully include people with learning disabilities. However, the original scoping draft specifically excluded them, despite NHS England and the Department of Health commenting on the first draft.

Here, Pauline Heslop, one of the authors of the Confidential Inquiry report and a key campaigner to get people with learning disabilities included in the scope, talks about some the issues this raises.

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Stigma in bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder: time for a cultural shift.

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Andrew Shepherd summarises a critical realist analysis that looks at experiences of stigma in people with bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder. He concludes that a profound social change in public and professional attitudes is necessary before mental health stigma can be effectively eradicated.

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People with mental illness are more likely to be victims of homicide than perpetrators of homicide

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Dave Steele reports on a recent observational case series published in the Lancet Psychiatry, which concludes that patients with mental illness are two and a half times more likely to be victims of homicide than the general population.

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Does racial discrimination affect the mental health of children and young people?

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Recent adult mental health policy initiatives, such as the Delivering Race Equality programme (PDF) show the increasing recognition of racial discrimination in NHS mental health services. In 2012 the NHS Confederation issued guidance on achieving race equality in mental health, which was summarised on the Mental Elf a while ago. These UK policy developments on [read the full story…]

We ignore the rise of suicide in people with mental illness

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Despite public campaigns to combat stigma around mental illness, people with mental health problems still face ongoing discrimination. And while some sections of the media focus on mental illness in cases of violence, a rise in the number of people who are more of a risk to themselves goes unnoticed. We still find it difficult [read the full story…]

Depression, discrimination, stigma: new cross-sectional survey in The Lancet

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A new cross-sectional survey published in The Lancet has revealed some unsurprising but nonetheless sobering facts about how people with depression are stigmatised. The research team, funded by money from the European Commission, interviewed 1,082 people with depression from 35 countries across the world. They used the discrimination and stigma scale (version 12; DISC-12) to [read the full story…]

Australian study finds routine use of restraint on people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour

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This Australian study set out to look at the use of restraints and seclusion as responses to people with learning disabilities with behaviour described as challenging. The authors point out that the prevalence rate of such restrictive practices is difficult to agree as previous studies have not used population-level data. They used data on the [read the full story…]