community health

Greetings from the UK, where I am currently visiting as many people and services as I can to create new relationships and a close dialogue between the Open Dialogue Centre in Australia and those who are adopting the approach across services in the UK.

Recently I attended the Prevention in Place conference in Naarm / Melbourne where I was inspired by the possibility for large-scale change by re-thinking how our systems interact with people and local services in place.

As the demand for mental health support and services increases, so too does the need to build a collaborative and responsive mental health and wellbeing system that moves beyond a focus on clinicians and emergency departments.

The relationship between language, practice and pathways in mental health has always interested me, particularly because the experiences that most of us have in life are often excluded from the labels and terms that get used in a biomedical model of mental health care.

The World Health Organisation defines the social determinants of health as ‘the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age’.

Late last year I received an email from a GP in our network who is working in NSW.

He had taken the time to carefully synthesise the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Community Guidance on mental health services which highlights examples from around the world where communities, services, hospitals, networks, homes, institutions and support groups are collaborating with people and families in innovative and inspiring ways. They are driving change in how mental health care is thought about and delivered.