Thoughts for Mental Health Week
It’s National Mental Health Week leading up to World Mental Health Day on 10th October. It’s a good time to think about the service we provide as general practitioners for patients with mental health problems - and our role in the system.
At GP15, The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners Annual Conference in September, Dr Alessandro R Demaio, http://sandrodemaio.com/about ,a public health physician from Harvard Medical School (but originally from Melbourne) gave the opening address. He focussed on non-communicable diseases and the epidemic of preventable lifestyle-related diseases like diabetes and obesity that we are facing this century. He talked at length about prevention and the GPs role.
We know that physical conditions predispose people to mental health problems and are exacerbated by them. We also know that mental health problems predispose people to physical health conditions.
What if we as GPs could do something about prevention in mental health? What if we could identify those who might be vulnerable to mental health problems (because we know much more about our patients and their families than most other professionals do) and guide them to places where they could learn life skills and emotional management skills to reduce their vulnerability?
What if those places were online?
For Mental Health Week I challenge you to think about ways you can use eMH resources to help build resilience in your patients – and maybe actually help prevent mental and physical illness in a few of them.
Gerhard is a full professor of Clinical Psychology at Linköping University, Sweden since 2003, an
d affiliated researcher at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. Professor Andersson is an internationally recognized researcher in the field of CBT delivered through information and communication technology, as well as the author of the book “The Internet and CBT: a clinical guide”.
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