Campaigning for talking therapies

The NICE Guidelines are the highest level of guidance in the NHS.
They say, “Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) should be available as a treatment option for people with schizophrenia”. And “Family interventions should be available to the families of people with schizophrenia who are living with or who are in close contact with the service user”.

CBT and family interventions are talking therapies that have a lot of evidence, from research and what carers and users say, to show they can work in severe mental illnesses.

The full NICE guidelines

Health Trusts are meant to uphold the NICE guidelines. 

Don’t let CBT really mean Can’t Blooming Geddit.
Get out there and campaign for what we know works. But how?

Quote the above NICE Guidelines to your Care Coordinator, CPN or Psychiatrist. One of then should arrange for you to get CBT as a user or as a whole family. Make an appointment to see one of them, or go to the Ward Round and ask for CBT. If you are turned down for any reason, Rethink wants to know about it. Send your story to Rethink campaigns.

We cannot have a therapy that works not being available. The newer atypicals used not to be available but Rethink campaigned for years and now most people who need atypicals can get them, thanks to them being included in the NICE Guidelines.

In 1997, only 6% of anti-psychotics were atypicals, but now that figure is 66%. So campaigning does work.

Carers should be included in all this
That is what family interventions means. Carers are the Mums, Dads, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, grandparents, cousins, gay and lesbian partners, good friends. All those people who provide regular and substantial care.

Don’t fall for the prejudice that all of these people are somehow holding the service user back. Everybody affected needs help.

This is a true story.
K and his Mum J were at loggerheads. K wanted to stop taking his medication because he was sleeping 16 hours per day. J said if your stop, you will relapse. They went to a Rethink group together. The other users and carers said that the medication was really old fashioned and they ought to go see the Psychiatrist about reviewing the medication. Going to the group gave them the confidence to do this. By the time of the next meeting, K was not only on the newest atypical, but he was back in work for the first time in years.

All this only happened because Rethink people, and others, campaigned for years for better NICE Guidelines to get the best fit medications.

Now we need loads of campaigners up and down the country to campaign for CBT.