About the Images of Psychiatry campaign
Promoting understanding of mental health issues and psychiatry
is a core element of the College’s public education
responsibility.
The Images of Psychiatry campaign
will build on the successful work of the Partners in Care
and Changing Minds campaigns to ensure that
service user and carer issues, and the fight against stigma,
continue to be priorities for the College.
The campaign will also take the message that
psychiatry is a modern, exciting and challenging field of medicine
to students and their teachers, both in schools and universities,
and encourage mature entrants to medical schools from amongst
people with experience of mental health issues, for example through
family experience, as a carer or as a mental health
professional.
The campaign has five main objectives:
- To increase awareness amongst young
people of psychiatry as a modern, therapeutic medical
discipline which supports recovery.
- To ensure user and carer issues are core to
psychiatry as a discipline, from training to everyday practice,
and that the outcomes of the Partners in Care
campaign continue to be supported.
- To ensure mental health is covered in the
school curriculum in relevant subjects, and as a cross cutting
theme, to ensure that pupils are aware of mental health issues and
can make an informed choice about a career in mental
health.
- To raise the number of UK medical
students choosing psychiatry as their first choice career to
10%.
- To ensure that stigma associated
with psychiatry and mental illness has been reduced as evidenced by
a national opinion poll in 2008 compared with 2003 and
1998.