The National Health Service (NHS) is obviously of pivotal importance in relation to mental healthcare within the UK. This book about the NHS has been written by John Ballatt and Penelope Campling. The publishers say: “Intelligent Kindness is a powerful new…
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“Psychiatrists have settled for treating symptoms rather than causes, embracing the apparent medical rigor of DSM diagnoses and prescription in place of learning the more challenging craft of therapeutic counseling …” This book , written within an American context, comes from…
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“The use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to treat depression should be immediately suspended, a study says” Mark Easton reports for the BBC: “ECT involves passing electric currents through a patient’s brain to cause seizures or fits. Dr John Read, of the…
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“Professor Bullmore explores how the current division between Psychiatry and the rest of medicine has developed and how we might change that. He puts forward a fascinating theory that attributes depression to inflammation rather than serotonin imbalance as has traditionally…
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“We … recommend a paradigmatic revision of the empirical and conceptual frameworks used to think about mental health. A classification approach that pursues the neo-Kraepelinian goal (now nearly half a century old) of establishing biomarkers for individual conditions or symptoms…
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“That first snowdrop, the flowering of the rose you pruned, a lettuce you grew from seed, the robin singing just for you. These are small things but all positive, all healing in a way that medicine tries to mimic.” Helena…
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The Goodreads website says: “Emma Mitchell has suffered with depression – or as she calls it, ‘the grey slug’ – for twenty-five years. In 2003, she moved from the city to the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens and began to take…
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“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly…
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“… without so called ‘evidence’ there is no seat at the guideline table. This is the fundamental ‘commissioning bias,’ the elephant in the room, because the drug industry controls and funds most research. So the drug industry and EBM [evidence…
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“As lockdown eases, the government’s fixation on top-down strategy is risking the mental health of the loneliest citizens” A centralised approach characterises many government schemes in relation to mental health and wellbeing (the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme, for…
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