Person-centred care in psychiatry

I mentioned before (see post) that the Royal College of Psychiatrists had set up a scoping group to make training more person-centred. It produced its report in 2018 (see subsequent BJPsych Bulletin article and BJPsych International article).

What I tend to emphasise about person-centred care is the fundamental change in perspective required to shift from a physical disease model of mental illness, and illness in general, to a holistic perspective (eg. see previous post). Human beings are organisms, not machines (see eg. previous post), so medicine needs to focus on persons, not just their bodies. Certainly for mental illness, there’s not much point just focusing on the brain (see eg. another previous post).