Primary Care Mental Health
Edited by Linda Gask, Helen Lester, Tony Kendrick and Robert Peveler
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