Integrated Mental Health Care A Comprehensive, Community-Based Approach

A new, practical and cost effective approach to the provision of mental health services to a community.

This challenging book is based on the experience of the pioneering Buckingham project, a comprehensive mental health service focusing on primary care, and describes a new approach to the provision of mental health service to a community. Using the vulnerability-stress model of mental illness, the authors place their findings and recommendations in the wider context of mental health care provision, and draw widely on international research in this field. They insist on a rigorous approach to the provision and evaluation of care, and use telling case studies to reveal the benefits as well as some of the difficulties that may be experienced. The practical and cost effective approach described will be of the greatest interest to health care professionals in whatever treatment setting they may be working.

1. Introduction: who needs community-based care?; 2. Community management of mental disorders: integrating patients, carers and primary health care with specialist mental health services; 3. Effective therapeutic strategies; 4. Early detection of major mental disorders; 5. Problem-based assessment of functioning; 6. Crisis intervention and intensive care for acute episodes: creating an asylum at home; 7. Prevention of recurrent disorders; 8. Integrated clinical management of the long-term disabled; 9. Assessment of benefits and costs of the service to the community; 10. Conclusions and future directions.

A challenging book which describes a new, practical, problem-solving and cost effective approach to the provision of mental health services to a community. The authors draw widely on international research in the field in a book which will be of the greatest interest to health care professionals in whatever treatment setting they may be working.