Date: Wednesday 25 June
Time: 11.55am - 1.10pm

Overview

Unsettling what’s going wrong in women’s mental health care and achieving real change must be a priority for psychiatry and psychiatrists. Beginning with a lived experience perspective on women’s mental health care, we will then consider how sexual violence and abuse continue to occur within the services we provide and what must be done to challenge this.  Sex and gender both influence health outcomes, yet psychiatric research and practice do not adequately account for these considerations resulting in guidelines and care models that are not tailored to women’s bodies or their needs. Although many of the barriers to improving women’s mental health care lie in policy and service configuration, we will conclude the session with actions that psychiatrists can take now to improve their own clinical practice, and the culture and standard of care within their own services.

In this session you will:

• Be given an example of a lived experience perspective of what must change in women’s mental health and understand some potential harms of inaction
• Learn how to use national data sets to appreciate the scale of the sexual harm in in-patient settings and understand core principles of a best practice response
• Learn how sex and gender intentional research can improve approaches to the mental healthcare of women and girls (as well as men, non-binary people and the trans population) to improve diagnosis, management and outcomes
• Be provided with practical approaches they can implement to improve clinical practice in mental health services and understand why they are particularly important for women