Protecting physical health in people with mental illness: 2025 updates for the Lancet Psychiatry Commission

Date: Tuesday 24 June
Time: 4.10am - 5.25pm

Overview

This session accompanies the 2025 update to The Lancet Psychiatry Commission for Protecting the Physical Health of People with Mental Illness. People with mental illness have an increased risk of physical disease, as well as reduced access to adequate health care. Physical health disparities are observed across all mental illnesses in all countries. The high rate of physical comorbidity, which often has poor clinical management, reduces life expectancy for people with mental illness and increases the personal, social, and economic cost of mental illness across the lifespan.

The 2019 Lancet Psychiatry Commission provided a blueprint for protecting the physical health in people with mental illness. The 2025 update builds on this foundation and provides in-depth guidance on lifestyle interventions and management of the physical side effects of psychotropics. In this session, Dr Maria Kapi (London, UK) will reflect on her lived experience of mental illness and associated physical comorbidity and medication side-effects. She will emphasise the importance of psychiatrists considering both body and mind in their treatment approaches.

Dr Katarzyna Machaczek (Sheffield, UK) will provide an overview of lifestyle interventions in mental healthcare with an emphasis on implementation. Dr Toby Pillinger (London, UK) will provide a structured systems-based overview of side effects associated with antipsychotic, antidepressant, and mood stabiliser treatment. He will then describe evidence-based management approaches with a focus on day-to-day clinical practice.

In this session, you will:

  • Understand the importance of managing physical comorbidity to people with lived experience of mental illness
  • Understand how to effectively implement lifestyle interventions in mental healthcare, focusing on tailoring programmes to individual needs and approaches in resource-limited settings.
  • Understand how to routinely manage physical side-effects of psychotropics, considering lived experience input and the challenges of such an approach in resource-limited settings.

Speakers

Chair: Dr Joseph Firth, University of Manchester, Manchester

Severe mental illness and physical comorbidity: the lived experience

Dr Maria Kapi, King's College London, London

Lifestyle interventions in mental healthcare: moving from recommendations to implementation

Dr Katarzyna Machaczek, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield

The Lancet Psychiatry Commission: an approach for holistic management of physical health side-effects of psychiatric medication

Dr Toby Pillinger, King's College London, London

 

Register for Congress 2025

Please email congress@rcpsych.ac.uk or call 020 8618 4120 with any enquiries.