What role should psychoanalysis play in modern mental health practice?

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Camille Hart and Iain McDougall explore a recent narrative review by Jessica Yakeley and argue that psychodynamic psychotherapies should be made more widely available within UK mental health services.

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Do general hospital staff stigmatise people with mental illness?

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Rebecca Stevenson writes her debut elf blog on a recent systematic review looking at general hospital health professionals’ attitudes and perceived dangerousness towards patients with comorbid mental and physical health conditions.

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The side-effects of antipsychotics: let’s systematically assess, discuss and act! #NPNR2016

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A live blog published at the 22nd International Network for Psychiatric Nursing Research conference in Nottingham.

Written by John Baker, Lucy Brazener, Wendy Cross, Vanessa Garrity, Andrew Grundy, Cher Hallett, Ben Hannigan, Elaine Hanzak and Alan Simpson.

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Staff understanding of recovery-orientated mental health practice: A critical note of caution?

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Andrew Shepherd considers the findings of a recent systematic review and narrative synthesis, which looks at staff understanding of recovery-orientated mental health practice.

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Challenges in respecting autonomy in end-of-life care of people with learning disabilities

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Autonomy is defined as the freedom to determine one’s own actions or behaviour. It is a value at the heart of health and social care support and those supporting people with learning disabilities are constantly striving to maintain and indeed increase the autonomy of those they provide help to. The authors of this Netherlands based [read the full story…]

Challenging behaviour training may change carer attributions whether or not these are the focus of training

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We have posted previously about the impact of carer attributions regarding the behaviour of people with learning disabilities and the impact these can have on carer responses. The authors of this systematic review were interested in the effects of carer training in challenging and complex behaviour. The researchers searched the literature and included papers that [read the full story…]

Staff responses to challenging behaviour in people with learning disabilities a dynamic and retroactive process

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Emerson et al’s seminal definition of challenging behaviour identified not only its interactional nature, but also pointed out that people with such issues in their life were at risk of being denied access to regular community activities. The researchers in this study were interested in the gap that they believe exists between what we understand [read the full story…]

Review suggests need for enhanced training and practice opportunities for professionals supporting people with dual diagnosis

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Estimates of the numbers of people with learning disabilities who also have a co-morbid psychiatric disorder vary considerably between studies, from 14 to 39%. This review set out to look at the knowledge, attitudes and training of professionals supporting people with both learning disability and psychoatric disorder, termed in this study, dual diagnosis. The authors [read the full story…]

Clear policy and procedure required to guide social interaction between support staff and people with congenital deafblindness

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A recent review of literature suggested that interactions between support workers and people with learning disabilities with congenital deafblindess were lacking both in quantity and in quality. The authors of the current small study wanted to look in more detail at the perspectives of the support staff on their interactions with this group of people. [read the full story…]

Using unnamed vignettes may underestimate carers responses to challenging behaviour in people with learning disabilities

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This study looked at the responses of paid carers to incidents of challenging behaviour. The author was interested in the potential inconsistency of responses. Studies of responses to challenging behaviour have used stimuli that might generate different responses from carers to those that might be generated by actual instances of behaviour of real people. To [read the full story…]