Authors: Simon Swinson, Grenville Rose, Michael Wren, Kate Ball
Year: 2019
Event: 2019 TheMHS Conference
Subject: Quality Mental Health Support from the Point Of View of People Accessing Mental Health Support Services.
Type of resource: Conference Presentations and Papers
Abstract:
Biography:
Grenville Rose is pleased to have been working in the community managed mental health sector for over 10 year following a decade or so working in Food Science before becoming a registered psychologist and finding more rewarding work. Grenville’s main interests are in attitudes and the barriers they can create.
Michael Wren is an Expert by Experience, Lived Experience Systemic advocate. He is an Emeritus member of the Flourish Australia Community Advisory Council and member of the Social Citizenship Think Tank. He holds certificates in IT and is a valuable member of the Flourish Australia community.
Simon Swinson is a Lived Experience expert and advocate of people with lived experience who has been active in this field for over a decade. He publicly speaks of his experiences living with Schizophrenia and has been involved in the Flourish Community Advisory Council and numerous policy design groups.
There have been a number of published works that have investigated the differential attitudes of mental health professionals towards people with mental health issues, including two recent Australian studies, (Reavley, Mackinnon, Morgan, & Jorm, 2014) (Rose, von Hippel, Brener, & von Hippel, 2018). There have, however, been fewer works coming from the point of view of the people accessing their services. There is a particular paucity of information regarding whether people accessing the services of a number of health professions perceive the attitudes of the different professionals to be comparable and what any differences might mean. The Australian studies cited and qualitative work conducted at Flourish Australia in 2018 suggest that better quality support is a function of: service collaboration, empowerment, and the service being seen as individualised and humanising. Further, the humanising and individual nature of support appeared to be in conflict with medicalisation of the support. Further quantitative work was conducted at Flourish Australia in 2019 to determine whether the requirement of individual humanising care is broadly being met by different categories of mental health professionals, specifically: psychiatrists, psychologists, support workers, and peer support workers. Results from the qualitative and quantitative work at Flourish Australia will be presented.
Learning Objectives
Learning Objective 1: The audience will take away an enhanced appreciation of what makes for quality humanising support in a collaborative multidisciplinary environment.
Learning Objective 2: Particularly in the current context of the publication of the Power Threat Meaning model of psychological support by the British Psychological Society and the implications of the ‘Dodo Hypothesis’ of Bruce Wampold and others there is an opportunity for non-government psychosocial support services to further demonstrate the tremendous value of the provision of humanising psychosocial support in the provision of quality mental health services.
References
Reavley, N J, Mackinnon, Andrew J, Morgan, Amy J, & Jorm, Anthony F. (2014). Stigmatising attitudes towards people with mental disorders: A comparison of Australian mental health professionals with the general community. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 48(5), 433-441.
Rose, Grenville, von Hippel, Courtney, Brener, Loren, & von Hippel, Bill. (2018). Attitudes of people working in mental health non-governmental organisations in Australia: A comparison with other mental health professionals. Health Psychology Open, 5(1). doi:10.1177/2055102918765413
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