Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

Articles published by guardian.co.uk Society about: Mental health

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Students stay silent about mental health problems, survey shows

20th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

One in five suffer psychological ill health, but most shun university counsellingUniversities should do more to encourage students with mental health problems to seek help, a leading charity has warned.More than a quarter (26%) of students who say they experience mental health problems do not get treatment and only one in 10 use counselling services provided by their university, according to a National Union of Students (NUS) study.Of the students surveyed by the union, one in five say they experienced mental health problems while at university. This is in line with national statistics estimating that in any one year 23% ...

Are mental illnesses such as PMS and depression culturally determined? | Corrinne Burns

20th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

A growing number of psychiatrists suspect mental conditions are 'culture-bound syndromes' rather than exclusively biologicalThe latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – DSM 5 – was published over the weekend. Produced by the American Psychiatric Association, it describes the symptoms of a vast range of mental illnesses and is intended as a guide to diagnosis.Why should we in the UK care? Simple: the political dominance of the US means that as soon as a mental disorder is named in the DSM, that disorder becomes valid in the eyes of many.But not everyone is a fan. ...

Clinical anxiety is becoming a worry

19th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

Generalised anxiety disorder affects one in 20 adults, and there is increasing concern about how it is diagnosed and treatedEver since she can remember, 21-year-old Emma Campbell has been living in a state of heightened anxiety. As a child she used to stay up worrying about school work and her family, becoming so anxious that, eventually, she stopped eating. She was seven when she first started suffering panic attacks, waking up out of breath and sweating almost every night for several years.Campbell received therapy as a teenager, which offered her some respite. But panic set in once again when she ...

Mental illness: the claim that abuse is behind psychosis is irresponsible | the big issue

19th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

Oliver James's assertions are unhelpful and risk demonising peopleIn more than 30 years of clinical practice, mostly in general practice, I have encountered much mental illness and experienced it in family members also. To polarise the debate between organic psychiatry looking for elusive biomarkers and promoting drug-based treatments versus Oliver James's assertion that "abuse is the major cause of psychosis" is unhelpful ("Medicine's big new battleground: does mental illness really exist?", News).Primary-care physicians, who see and treat the vast majority of mental illness in the UK, are trained to see presentations of illness in biological, psychological and social terms. All ...

New US manual for diagnosing mental disorders published

18th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, has divided medical opinionThe field of mental health will face its greatest upset in years on Saturday with the publication of the long-awaited and deeply-controversial US manual for diagnosing mental disorders.Early drafts of the book, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, have divided medical opinion so firmly that authors of previous editions are among the most prominent critics.Known informally as the psychiatrists' bible, the $199 tome from the American Psychiatric Association is the guidebook that US doctors will ...

'Given how bankers appear to treat each other, should we be surprised they don't care for the rest of us?' | Joris Luyendijk

16th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

That's Joris Luyendijk's question, after hearing from Karin Peeters, who works with bankers. What would you like to ask this coach/therapist? She'll be online to respondWhat if it isn't coke-snorting hedonism or psychopathic sadism, but rather deep emotional insecurity that drives many investment bankers? A recent interviewee claimed as much when she said "a lot of them just need a hug".Today's interviewee, Karin Peeters, is a coach/therapist who works with bankers on a daily basis. She says:"A common coping mechanism for dealing with a lack of self-esteem is to develop feelings of superiority and grandiosity, as a protection against feelings ...

Coach/therapist: 'What banks are offering people is an identity' | Joris Luyendijk

16th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

Karin Peeters, a life and executive coach working with bankers, talks about low self-esteem in the sector – and the problem with banker bashingMany readers have pointed out that this blog is inherently biased because it depends on volunteers. In a further attempt to widen the scope, today's interviewee is Karin Peeters, a coach/therapist who spends many of her days speaking to bankers. She is a cheerful woman, born and raised in the Netherlands and a resident of London since 2008."Some of my clients have removed their job title from internet-dating sites. It's as if they feel ashamed to work ...

Police cells are not for mentally ill people, says Theresa May

15th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

Home secretary tells Police Federation of drive to end use of police cells for people detained for their own safetyA drive to end the use of police cells as "places of safety" for mentally ill people who are detained for their own safety has been announced by the home secretary.Theresa May told the Police Federation that police officers were not meant to be social workers, psychiatrists or ambulance drivers and should not have to spend 15 to 25% of their time dealing with people with mental health problems."Police officers need the assurance that vulnerable people with mental health problems will ...

Charity highlights link between debt and mental health problems

15th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

Last year 5,000 people suffering from financial problems coupled with either anxiety or depression contacted StepChangeA charity has highlighted the extent to which debt affects mental health by revealing that last year it spoke to an average of 5,000 people a month who were suffering from financial problems coupled with either anxiety or depression.StepChange, a debt charity, said that it uses an online counselling tool to determine which people contacting it might be suffering from anxiety or depression. Of those who were, almost 60% were identified as suffering with severe anxiety or depression, a further 27% had moderate anxiety or ...

Doctors told to improve dementia diagnosis rates

15th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

More than half of the estimated 670,000 people living with condition in the UK have not been diagnosedDoctors will be set a target to diagnose another 160,000 dementia sufferers in a government drive to tackle the incurable brain condition. Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, says the NHS has shockingly low dementia diagnosis rates, with 350,000 of the estimated 670,000 people with dementia unknowingly living with the condition.Last year the health secretary compared current attitudes towards dementia to the way cancer was once viewed, saying it was approached with a "grim fatalism". He wrote in the Daily Telegraph that "as with ...

Letters: Carers let down by complicated and means-tested process

14th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

Macmillan Cancer Support welcomes the government's announcement that it will implement plans to improve co-ordination between health and social care (Plans unveiled for 'joined-up' health and social care, 14 May). People with cancer and their carers are often being let down by the current system, particularly at the end of life. Although the vast majority of people with cancer want to die at home surrounded by their loved ones, most will die in hospital simply because joined-up care services are not available in their local communities.The current process for accessing state-funded social care is complicated, lengthy and frequently operates separately ...

Is it unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes? | Poll

12th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

The British Psychological Society is calling for a 'paradigm shift' in issues of mental health are understood. Is the biomedical model of mental illness unhelpful?

Psychiatrists under fire in mental health battle

12th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

British Psychological Society to launch attack on rival profession, casting doubt on biomedical model of mental illnessThere is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain's clinical psychologists.In a groundbreaking move that has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society's division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a "paradigm shift" in how the issues of mental health are understood. The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry's ...

Do we need to change the way we are thinking about mental illness?

12th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

Experts on both sides of the debate over the classification of mental disorders make their caseNO Simon Wessely, member of the Royal College of PsychiatristsNext week the American Psychiatric Association is publishing its fifth take on the classification of psychiatric disorders, the DSM-5. Judging by the sound and fury, you might be forgiven for thinking that this is something radical – a great breakthrough in our struggle to better understand mental disorders, or alternatively a dastardly plot to extend the boundaries of psychiatry into everyday life and emotions at the behest of greedy drug companies. Or, if the position statement ...

Middle-age obesity 'will lead to a surge in dementia cases'

12th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

Study says hundreds of thousands more are at risk of Alzheimer'sSeveral hundred thousand more people in Britain may be at risk of succumbing to dementia than previously thought. That is the stark conclusion of two health experts who will warn on Sunday that rising levels of obesity in middle age – a condition recently linked to increased risks of Alzheimer's disease in later life – could produce a major jump in numbers of dementia sufferers by 2050."We know dementia levels are going to rise because our population is growing older and Alzheimer's disease is an illness of old age," said ...

Minds traumatised by disaster heal themselves without therapy

12th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

Aid agencies that promote one-off counselling sessions after major traumas only prolong victims' sufferingOne of the largest earthquakes ever recorded hit on Boxing Day 2004. The resulting tsunami devastated huge swaths of the Indian Ocean coastline and left an estimated quarter of a million people dead across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. Aid agencies quickly arrived to help battered and traumatised survivors.Mental health was a massive part of the emergency response but the World Health Organisation promptly did something it has never done before or since. It specifically denounced a type of psychological therapy and recommended that it shouldn't ...

Medicine's big new battleground: does mental illness really exist?

12th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

The latest edition of DSM, the influential American dictionary of psychiatry, says that shyness in children, depression after bereavement, even internet addiction can be classified as mental disorders. It has provoked a professional backlash, with some questioning the alleged role of vested interests in diagnosisIt has the distinctly uncatchy, abbreviated title DSM-5, and is known to no one outside the world of mental health.But, even before its publication a week on Wednesday, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, psychiatry's dictionary of disorders, has triggered a bitter row that stretches across the Atlantic and has fuelled a profound ...

Care workers should be monitored for mental health problems, warn doctors

11th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

Royal College of General Practitioners recommends creating a register of UK carers to help 40% who experience depressionCarers should be routinely screened for depression and mental health problems as they often "neglect" their own wellbeing, the Royal College of General Practitioners has warned.The college has recommended creating a register of the UK's 7 million carers to help the 40% of them who experience depression or psychological problems.It said holding routine appointments with carers and ensuring family doctors monitor those on a carers' register could tackle the "hidden" problem.Dr Clare Gerada, RCGP chairwoman, told BBC Breakfast: "Carers often neglect their own ...

The father I loved is all but gone

11th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

In her final column, Rebecca Ley explains why she will no longer be writing each week about her father's life with dementiaOn my last trip to Cornwall, it was clear that things for Dad are not good and are only going to get worse. The intermittent flashes of the father I loved are all but gone. What remains is just a painful descent, something dark and undignified that bears little value in examination. For that reason, this is my last column.In writing about him, I've hoped to honour the person he was and to connect with other people going through ...

Melvyn Bragg | My mother's descent into dementia

11th May 2013

Society: Mental health | guardian.co.uk

As an only child, and with his father away for years during the war, Melvyn Bragg was very close to his mother. He tells Angela Wintle about his love for her and her final descent into dementiaIt started in church. Melvyn Bragg was sitting beside his mother one Sunday morning in the parish church where she had been christened, baptised and married, when her head suddenly fell back and she appeared to be dead. "I didn't know what to do," he says. "I tried to find a pulse, but couldn't. Then a young woman vet climbed over the pews and ...