Talking about Mental Illness

I want to post an appreciation of how celebrities have used the media to speak about their Mental Health issues.  My hope is that when people read about how famous people have suffered they will feel empowered enough to talk about their own mental heath and seek help if they need it.

Prince Harry talked about his struggle

I am so glad that recent feature in the Daily Telegraph where Prince Harry talked about struggling to come to terms with his Mothers death her sought counselling. He talked about trying to deal with his grief without punching someone.

Post-partum psychosis in the News

A story in the BBC News of 13 March talked of Sally Wilson’s experience of her experience of Post-partum Psychosis PP following the birth of her daughter. This morning listening to BBC Radio 4 I heard Hannah Bissett talk about what happened after the birth of her child where she too suffered from PP. She spoke on behalf of Action on post-partum psychosis  for more information use  what is postpartum psychosis. In the news there was the tragic case of Alice Gibson-Watt who took her life after suffering from the same condition.

From personal experience

My Mother suffered from PP in the 1950’s after my birth and was kept in a Nursing Home for two years because of the obsessive behaviour and the strange ideas that she had. She escaped the Nursing Home one night, coming home in her nighty. My Father and my Grandmother managed to accommodate her back into our home, with help from my older sister who was three years old at that time. Due to the stigma associated with mental health my Mother was never able to normalise her condition and suffered bouts of mental illness throughout her life. If society had been more open to talking about mental illness, I believe that her life would have been easier and she would have felt accepted.

Mindfulness Group Therapy MGT is as good as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy CBT

Group Therapy
Group Therapy

Article in PsychCentral

An article by Traci Pedersen in PsychCentral reports that researchers at the Centre for Primary Health Care Research (CPF) in Malmo, Sweden in collaboration with Lund University have found Mindfulness Group Therapy MGT just as effective as individual CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) for a wide range of psychiatric symptoms including depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, aggression and paranoid ideation.

How were psychiatric symptoms measured?

Researchers looked at a wide range of psychiatric symptoms (measured by several types of questionnaires) and studied how these symptoms responded to treatment, either with mindfulness in group therapy or individual CBT.

They found that the average score for all 15 different subscales/indexes in the various questionnaires decreased significantly in both scales. The various scales measured, among others, symptoms of depression, general anxiety, stress and somatization, obsessive-compulsive disorder, interpersonal sensitivity, aggression, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism.

They found no difference in treatment outcomes between the two groups.

How many patients and which area. The study was an eight-week randomised controlled trial involving 215 patients from 16 different healthcare centres across Scania in southern Sweden. Psychiatric symptoms were measured by several types of questionnaire. The new findings are published in the journal European Psychiatry.

“Our new research shows that mindfulness group therapy has the equivalent effect as individual CBT for a wide range of psychiatric symptoms that are common among this patient group,” says Professor Jan Sundquist, who led the research group in the study which has been published in European Psychiatry.