Photo caption: Keith Bryant meeting with Sara Traynor and Tracy Lang standing outside the buildings of Wonford House at Wonford Hospital in Exeter, Devon.
What the ODDESSI Trial Could Mean for Mental Health
During a recent trip to the UK and Finland I was fortunate to meet with several leading mental health services as part of the NHS to talk about the increasing optimism in mental health care due to the highly anticipated soon to be released findings from the ODDESSI trial.
The word on the streets is that it’s good news.
As someone allergic to acronyms, ODDESSI stands for Open Dialogue: Development and Evaluation of a Social Network Intervention for Severe Mental Illness.
You can read about it here: https://lnkd.in/g2QwTbS7
Historically, indications from non-randomised studies show that Open Dialogue may help people in their recovery from major mental health crises and improve outcomes, but this was yet to be tested in a randomised controlled trial.
Until now.
The ODDESSI trial will provide evidence of whether the mental health system in the UK is somewhat transformed by implementing Open Dialogue. If so, this could have significant implications for how we organise mental health services in Australia, so they are more community-oriented, but also more affordable and effective.
A few key takeaways from my trip:
💡 Interest in whole-of-community systems in addressing mental health and wellbeing was huge.
💡 Curiosity about the work we are doing in Shepparton with the Goulburn Region Open Dialogue Connect (GRODC) platform for a whole-of-community response to youth mental health and wellbeing was ever present.
Anticipation and Optimism around ODDESSI Trial Results – very exciting for Open Dialogue.
Recognition of Open Dialogue Centre’s role to work alongside our community partners to enable transformation in how mental health care is delivered.
Although the ODDESSI results are not yet released, the Open Dialogue Centre now has a larger network of friends and colleagues who are deeply interested in our journey and aspirations – just as we are in theirs.
We will have many discussions about what the findings show and where it counts.
I am looking forward to the results of the ODDESSI trial and hope we can soon share what this may mean – not just for our training programs but also for our community partners whose local service leaders will be very interested in what it reveals.
Keith Bryant, CEO