Primary care is usually the first port of call for people with mental health problems and plays an increasingly important role in developing and delivering mental health services. Indeed, 90% of all patients with mental health problems (including 30–50% of all those with serious mental illness) only use primary care services.

How can practitioners in primary care best respond to psychiatric presentations? In this book, internationally respected authors provide a conceptual background and dispense practical advice for the clinician. They discuss ways of improving joint working between primary and secondary care, as well as issues affecting the professional development of all practitioners within primary care teams.

Key features:

• Practical advice
• Focus on improving services
• Critical analysis of the emerging evidence
• A user-centred approach, emphasising recovery
• Educational strategies to develop knowledge and skills of the primary care team.

Readership: General Practitioners (GPs) and all medical practitioners and managers in primary care.

About the editors:  

• Linda Gask provides consultant input to a primary care mental health service. Her teaching, research and clinical interests lie in improving the quality of care for common mental health problems.
• Helen Lester has a particular interest in the physical and mental healthcare of people with serious mental illness, the concept of recovery in primary care, and service-user involvement.
• Tony Kendrick has published extensively on the primary care of depression, schizophrenia and eating disorders. His work has been influential in the development of good practice guidelines and quality indicators in the UK for the management of severe mental illness and depression.
• Robert Peveler conducts research on medically unexplained physical symptoms, depression in primary care, self-care in chronic disease, and eating disorders. His clinical work is focused on general hospital liaison psychiatry, especially fatigue and pain.

Contents

Part I: Conceptual basis and overarching themes

1. What is primary care mental health?

2. Mental health and primary healthcare: an international policy perspective

3. The epidemiology of mental illness

4. A sociological view of mental health and illness

5. The service user perspective

6. Low- and middle-income countries

7. Diagnosis and classifi cation of mental illness: a view from primary care

Part II: Clinical issues

8. Depression

9. Suicide and self-harm

10. Anxiety

11. Medically unexplained symptoms

12. Mental health problems in older people

13. Perinatal mental health

14. Child and adolescent mental health

15. Psychosis

16. Emergencies in primary care

17. Substance misuse

18. Management of alcohol problems

19. Eating disorders

20. Physical health of people with mental illness

21. Ethnic minorities

22. Asylum seekers and refugees

23. Sexual problems

Part III: Policy and practice

24. Mental health promotion

25. Improving the quality of primary care mental health: what does and does not work?

26. Psychological treatments

27. Collaborative care and stepped care: innovations for common mental disorders

28. The role of practice nurses

Part IV: Reflective practice

29. Teaching and learning about mental health

30. Undertaking mental health research in primary care

31. Individual treatment decisions: guidelines and clinical judgement

32. Self and others: the mental healthcare of the practitioner

Epilogue: Racing pigeons and rolling rocks: reflections on complex problems in primary care