UK: People with mental illness receive inadequate treatment, misdiagnoses

From The Times in Britain:

People suffering from mental illness are frequently being misdiagnosed or receiving inadequate treatment, according to a group of leading psychiatrists.

The doctors say that patients with serious problems are often referred to psychologists and social workers rather than clinicians and do not receive the medical therapies they need.

'Treatment is often little more than jollying people along,' said Professor Nick Craddock, of the Medical School at Cardiff University, one of 36 signatories of a letter published June 276 in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

'If a GP suspected a patient had cancer, he wouldn't dream of referring him to anybody other than a cancer specialist. A cancer patient might need jollying along, but what he really needs is the correct diagnosis and treatment. That's what he gets from a specialist. But patients with mental illness are not automatically referred to psychiatrists. If they only see a social worker, there's every chance that mental illness, or underlying physical illness, will be missed. Patients are getting a bum deal.'

Describing their letter as a 'wake-up call' to British psychiatry, the psychiatrists say that the desire not to stigmatise people has also done damage by implying that there is no such thing as mental illness. Patients are now known as 'service users' rather than patients — even though, when asked, 67 per cent preferred the word patient and only 9 per cent service user. Treatments are provided at 'mental health' centres, not mental illness clinics.