Editorial

Citation

(2013), "Editorial", The Journal of Mental Health Training, Education and Practice, Vol. 8 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmhtep.2013.55508baa.001

Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: The Journal of Mental Health Training, Education and Practice, Volume 8, Issue 2.

With a major inquiry into the future of mental health services currently underway it is significant that this edition of the journal highlights several areas of innovation that relate to the education and training of the mental health workforce.

Two of the papers in this edition relate to developments in assistive technologies and the contribution these can make.

Mitchell et al. reports on how on how on-line discussion forums are helping mental health nurses to support and engage with service users while Lambert explores the opportunity for student nurses to engage with a virtual service user who has been admitted to an inpatient ward. Both of these papers suggest ways in which the technological developments can be transferred to other learning situations such as multi-disciplinary team activities.

Continuing with the theme of supporting students learning about mental health issues Phillips explores this issue in relation to students working with service users displaying suicidal behaviour. The study uses a qualitative, phenomenological approach to students’ experiences of supervision and debriefing to help them deal with traumatic incidents encountered in practice.

The final two papers in this edition relate to the broader concept of recovery, with Hungerford reporting on a single site case study in Australia that sought to implement recovery into a public mental health service and the arising concerns of practitioners dealing with complex issues in practice including the management of risk, and professional accountability. These are issues which have been raised with other workers in countries, such as the UK with, for example, graduate primary care workers, working with primary health care teams.

Whitehead's paper considers the increase of mental health interventions employing CBT techniques and the efficacy of such treatments for services users with disabilities, within the wider political debates around social inclusion.

All of the above papers suggest opportunities for more recovery-orientated approaches. This is timely given that an emerging paradigm for mental health training is the developing work of Recovery Colleges (Centre for Mental Health, 2012). These are service user-led education and training initiatives, typically located within existing mental health services. The colleges support a menu of educational courses, largely taught by service users themselves, to other service users, or jointly to mental health staff and service users. The theme of many of these courses is service user empowerment. The theme of recovery more generally will be picked up later in 2013 with a special edition of the journal dedicated to this topic.

Reference

Centre for Mental Health (2012), Implementing Recovery through Organisational Change, CMH, London