‘Did the mental health service that you used, give you the lifestyle that you wanted?’ , answers in a new ‘Which’ guide. At present consumers are entirely at the mercy of the manufacturer’s advertising.
The views of employer’s and GP’s have potentially a greater objectivity than that of the mental health service providers. The danger is that employers can by pass serious consideration of the matter, by reminding themselves that their primary objective is profit/productivity and that provided that they can be seen as making some gesture to health and wellbeing, ‘look no further’. In a similar way GP’s can bypass central processing of objective outcomes with a rationale that they are fully extended performing their primary function of looking after the physical health of patients, ‘so long as I can off-load mental health patients at least for a time so much the better’.
There is a pressing need to ask questions nobody wants to hear. According to George Orwell, liberty is the freedom to ask such questions. How much liberty is there really in the mental health/medical sphere?
Dr Mike Scott