Regarding your article (Scottish NHS boards pay up to £837 per hour for locums amid psychiatric crisis, October 7): the solution to this increasingly untenable situation is a change in approach to mental health care. Psychiatrists (medically qualified doctors who then treat emotional and mental health problems with medications) are necessarily focused on diagnosing a ‘disorder’ as a disease in the person. However, there is little evidence that this is effective for mental health problems in the vast majority of cases.
Studies have shown that a person-centered, non-diagnosis-driven and least medicalized approach is more effective, faster and with less clinical return in the longer term. Such an approach does not require consultant psychiatrists, but can be largely delivered by other therapists, with minimal referral to psychiatrists in a minority of cases.
What is needed is a shift from a medical model of mental health (mental health is an illness or imbalance in the patient that is treated independently of the events in their life) to a ‘within context’ (ecological paradigm) approach that it allows a greater number of therapists to help those in need. This would also reduce spending on expensive private services designed to turn a profit for companies that take large amounts of much-needed revenue out of our NHS.
Dr. Jennifer Poole
Chartered Psychologist, Romsey, Hampshire