Thursday, September 20, 2007

Call for hospital 'suicide teams'

A study by Auckland University psychiatrist Simon Hatcher has found that hospitals are failing to intervene before it is too late for many.
Hospitals see between 5000 and 6000 cases of self-harm a year ... but of this range,
* 95 per cent get psychiatric assessments ...
and it is presumably on this basis that
* Only 30 per cent get more than a follow-up phone call from a mental health crisis team within six months ... and yet
* Between 5 and 15 per cent are dead within five years.

Now is this really indicative of a need to impose more aggressively on this group of people?

"The ideal way to do it is to have a dedicated self-harm team in the same way as dedicated stroke teams. "They need to be multi-disciplinary, including mental health and physical health and non-health staff from non-government organisations, Work and Income, ACC and social workers, because people who present with self-harm often have multi-faceted problems."

Now I seem to recall that a number of studies have shown that greater contact with professionals created a greater preoccupation with insurmountable problems and hence lesser inclination to partcipate in alternative activity and greater probability of self harm?
... and strokes as an analogy?

1 comment:

ZenTiger said...

These would be the same teams that are also interviewing mothers and asking them if they are being beaten, I suppose?