Waterstones Book Launch for Gloucestershire Psychiatrist
19/03/2007
A psychiatrist in Gloucestershire has written a ground-breaking book which challenges policies throughout the health service for helping people with mental health problems.
Publication of the book by Dr Rachel Freeth, who works for Gloucestershire Partnership NHS Trust, is being launched at a special event at Waterstones in Gloucester this week (Friday 23rd March).
Dr Freeth is a staff grade general psychiatrist. For the past five years she has been based at Wotton Lawn Hospital, the county’s in-patient unit for adults of working age. Highly unusually for a psychiatrist, she has also trained and qualified as a counsellor for service users.
The book calls for a different approach within psychiatry, which she believes has become too mechanistic. Dr Freeth says she and her colleagues nationwide are not being sufficiently encouraged to see their patients as individuals.
“We are dealing with very vulnerable human beings. There can be a tendency for psychiatrists to treat people in a detached way, regarding them objectively in order to place them in an appropriate category.
“We need to listen better to the patient’s individual experience and develop a good relationship with each person. We do so much by protocol now that we sometimes forget to connect with the individual in front of us.”
Dr Freeth admits her “person-centred” approach, inspired by the work of an American theorist Carl Rogers in the 1960s, has become marginalised in modern psychiatry. However, she argues it still has vital importance as a “powerful and necessary healing ingredient” in mental health services.
Her book has won praise from the immediate past President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Dr Mike Shooter. In a foreword he describes it as “more inspiring than anything I have read for a very long time”.
“Humanising Psychiatry and Mental Health Care” is being published by Radcliffe Publishing. The launch, where copies will be on sale, takes place at Waterstones, 13-15 Eastgate Street, Gloucester, at 6pm on 23rd March.
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