Tag: UKOpenDialogue

New qualitative study seeks to examine the implementation of the Open Dialogue approach in the UK.

The Open Dialogue psychiatric treatment approach is associated with reduced utilization of mental and general health services for Danish youth.

In an article for Psychiatric Services, psychiatrist Christopher Gordon and his colleagues report on the results of a one-year feasibility study attempting to implement...

The Open Dialogue approach is a model of mental health care that involves a consistent family and social network approach. All healthcare staff receive training in family therapy and related psychological skills. October 2015 sees the completion of the first wave of Peer-supported Open Dialogue (POD) training for National Health Service (NHS) staff in the UK, paving the way for the establishment of pilot POD teams in the NHS and a large-scale evaluation.

It has been five years since I traveled to Western Lapland in Finland to film my documentary “Open Dialogue” on their Open Dialogue Project—the program, as I stated in the film, presently getting the best long-term statistical results in the world for the treatment of first-episode psychosis. My film came out four years ago, and since then I have been screening it around the world, giving lectures about Open Dialogue and my experience in Finland, participating in regular conferences and Q&A sessions about it, receiving daily emails, Facebook messages, blog and Youtube comments about it (as it’s now been free on Youtube for a year), and keeping in regular contact with some of the folks who work there. But I haven’t shared many of my updated opinions in writing, so I wish to do so now.

It isn’t easy coming to a point in your career where you begin to question widely held beliefs about the nature of mental illness, and how it should be treated. Indeed it becomes starkly obvious that, no matter what you think and believe, even know in your heart to be true, the world runs along different lines. Sometimes I can be full of hope for change, but frequently it angers and frustrates; often I am rendered melancholic by the mountain that lies ahead. Let me explain.

-On March 11, 2015, the NHS Foundation and three other Trusts are hosting a free conference to "take stock" after one year of Peer-supported Open Dialogue.

Psychiatrist Tom Stockman has been posting a series of articles on his blog Mandala, reflecting on the Open Dialogue method for intervening in psychiatric...

Open Dialogue is an innovative, network-based approach to persons experiencing severe psychiatric crises and conditions. Developed at Keropudas Hospital in Tornio, Finland, this way of working has garnered international attention for its outcomes with first time psychosis. Noting the positive interest Open Dialogue has begun to attract in the U.S., publisher Marvin Ross, in a recent Huffington Post blog (11/11/13), argues that before making the global claim that Open Dialogue achieves better results than standard treatment, we need to do more research. I agree.

In the wake of the new study by Dutch researcher Lex Wunderink, it is time for psychiatry to do the right thing and acknowledge that, if it wants to do best by its patients, it must change its protocols for using antipsychotics. The current standard of care, which—in practice—involves continual use of antipsychotics for all patients diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, clearly reduces the opportunity for long-term functional recovery.

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Trailer for "Open Dialogue," a 74-minute documentary film on the Western Lapland Open Dialogue Project, the program presently getting the best results in the...