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Speaker: David Crepaz-Keay
Session report by Jan McGregor Hepburn, BPC DAVID CREPAZ-KEAY is Head of Patient and Public involvement for the Mental Health Foundation, and has a 25 year history as a patient and campaigner; he told us he had been given at least 6 diagnoses in his time as a patient, and every professional had seemed to want to stop him “hearing and seeing things that other people don’t see and hear”, but he still did. It seemed sad to me that seemingly no-one had wanted to find out with him what they meant. He said that patients want talking therapies for 3 main reasons- that they had already had experience, or knew someone who had, and found it helpful; they are desperate, and think it just might help; and/or anything that is not drugs is a good idea. He gave us his rules for therapists: 1. Do not promise - talking therapies aren’t going to cure everything 2. Be very careful of diagnostic boxes 3. Remember that the patient is not a passive recipient; service user involvement is not very advanced in the psychological therapies By this point I was feeling a bit smug; I thought we would score well. However, the next point was not so comfortable: 4. Do not move to being a smug friendly person; this is patronising and creates dependency. He was in favour of government involvement to look at, and hopefully tackle, social inequalities. His goals were that people are helped to regain control over their own lives, and manage themselves, and that evidence should be assessing the patient’s desired outcome. |
