Promoting psychosocial approaches for more compassionate mental health services

Liberati and colleagues’ recent article on the need to embed compassion in mental health services resonated with our experiences.1 Achieving this will require the skills of a range of professions to be used and promoted. Anecdotally and supported in research, medical perspectives dominate in services, in terms of both those holding influential positions of power and the overall culture and practice approaches of teams.234 As the authors note, this risks biomedical paradigms being reinforced, rather than the integration of more holistic understandings of mental distress that more readily cultivate compassionate approaches.Research has found, for example, that social workers in multidisciplinary mental health services report marginalisation of their professional contributions, with social approaches to mental health considered subordinate to medical models of understanding mental health and its management.56 Research has also found the language of “recovery” to be contested in mental health services. The recovery model is a holistic approach to…
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