Letter

Wanted: something completely different

Dear healthmatters— While I retain what is probably a very unhealthy scepticism towards complementary therapies, nowhere does it make more sense to view a person’s problems within a wider context (as outlined by Julie Stone, Beyond the fringe, issue 24) than in the area of mental health services.

At successive conferences I have organised for mental health service users the call to health and social services planners and practitioners consistently has been for less reliance on purely physical treatments (ie drugs and ECT) and more availability of other forms of treatment including complementary therapies. The workshop on such therapies at our most recent conference was, by far, the most popular.

Appropriate regulatory controls of therapies are one thing, but until psychiatrists question their unshakeable belief in the efficacy and acceptability of psychotropic medication — a belief which frequently is not shared by those on the receiving end — there seems little hope of any alternative therapy becoming more mainstream.

Makes a nonsense of a user-led approach to service provision, doesn’t it?