Related Mental Health: March 2004 Archives
The National Institute of Clinical Excellence are in the process of developing guidelines for self-harm treatment in the UK. Further details are available here. The finished guideline will be published in July 2004.
An two-year inquiry into self-harm in young people in the UK has just been announced, chaired by the Mental Health Foundation and the Camelot Foundation. The inquiry aims to understand more about the causes of self-harm in 11-25 year olds and find out what can be done to help.
This is great news, especially as self harm may be becoming more common, affecting up to 1 in 10 teenagers and resulting in 150,00 A&E visits per year. Sadly, many of those visiting A&E are discharged without being offered psychological or psychiatric help and are may face negative attitudes from hospital staff.
All this week, BBC digital music station 6Music have been running a campaign about the links between mental health issues and music. called 'Songs that Saved My Life'.
There have been items on various different shows during the week, covering issues such as the emotional impact of music, interviews with a range of musical artists about how their music and performance has been affected by their state of mind and mood induction experiments live online. Listeners have been invited to vote for their top 'Song that Saved my Life'.
This evening, Tom Robinson's Evening Sequence featured a discussion with music journalist Patrick Humphries and yours truly, talking about the tortured artist in music. You can listen to the programme between now and next thursday on the Evening Sequence webpage (click on 'Listen to Thursday's Programme')
Update, 18/3/04: Unfortunately, you can no longer listen to the programme on the BBC website as they only keep recordings for 1 week. But links to mental health resources and helpline details are still available.
I did quite a bit of research before the programme and wanted to mention a few of really good resources I came up with.
I wanted to mention a resource available on the
The site contains a wealth of information and advice on mental health problems including pages on different problems, seeking help and what different professionals do. The are pages on both anorexia and bulimia too. I must confess a vested interest as I was involved with writing some of the material as part of a campaign on mental health issues which Radio1 ran last year, called 'Mental Health: Read the Signs'.
I've just watched the first of 4 short 'animated documentaries' on mental health topics on Channel 4. The programmes each deal with a different mental health problem - today's was on agoraphobia - and combine voice-over from a person who suffers with a particular problem with animation by way of illustration. The result is quite an interesting and unusual depiction of the problem, which avoids the 'docu-drama' feel that you so often get on this type of programme.
The series is a collaboration between APT Films and the Documentary Filmmakers Group (DFG). Unusually, the producer/director is a working clinical psychologist, Andy Glynne, who also lectures on my DClinPsy course at UCL.
There are three further programmes on Tuesday to Thursday of this week at 7.55. They deal with psychosis (2nd March), obsessive compulsive disorder (3rd March) and finally manic depression (4th March).
