Guardian - Mental health services in crisis are abandoning patients to meet targets May 2019

From Recovery in the Bin

full article here
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...-vulnerable-off-rolled?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

 

Ah, I see that IAPT is going splendidly well. The one trick to meet that absurd 50% "recovery" target: redefine "recovery" as "whatever" and kick off people who won't meet it. Genius!

Who could have predicted that overloading mental health services with people whose primary needs are medical care would be a bad idea? Surely no one. Well, no one who was listened to anyway. Good job, Simon. You truly are "too smart" to be a psychiatrist.

Other controversial predictions include: hot stoves are hot and unpleasant to touch, having sick people yelling at their symptoms is ridiculously unprofessional, depriving sick people of basic medical and social care is bad. Best of all: my predictions are free and come with significant long-term savings and economic success.

 

Hopefully this will encourage the MUS empire builders to think again about trying to hijack ME, given we are a patient group where their preferred treatment methods have demonstrably failed.

However I guess this just means the empire builders will keep trying to force us into an inappropriate service which in turn will desperately be trying to discharge us as quickly as possible, leaving even more people lost in a service limbo.

 

tick box exercises have always been about been counting and have in my experience led to far worse customer/client satisfaction. It is always politically motivated because of the soundbite effect in mass media . It is possible in an alternative universe that this method actually produces value for money ?

 

The lesson is those delivering the assessments need to be independent from those delivering the services.

Redefining "recovery" or whatever post-hoc and then claiming you met the pre-defined target is fraud.

 

Having a family member involved in this it is a worry. His support has been passed onto a community group which is very good but it is reliant on grants. Too many community groups have had their grants removed and closed.

So the NHS justifies moving patients on because community support is available but when that support is removed, they don't care.

 

@dave30th This thread may be of interest to you if you plan on writing any articles on IAPT.

 

I have no idea what people were expecting. None of this can scale up in a meaningful way. Even in the most perfectly controlled circumstances it barely produces a weak, self-reported and thus non-standardized, questionnaire effect and those would be many times more expensive than what it aims to replace. It makes exactly as much sense as deploying an electric grid on direct current, with repeater stations every km, massive power leakage and constant risk of fire. Absurdly naive and promoted by people who clearly have no idea what they're doing.

And yet there is no mental health crisis, the vast majority of those are casual misdiagnoses where perfectly normal behavior in difficult circumstances is pathologized. It's a worthless solution to a made-up problem that carries a huge opportunity cost, as hundreds of millions are wasted rather than being put to good use.