Challenges in Primary Mental Health Care. Models for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Introduction

Family Medicine facing multiple crisis.            

Christos Lionis  Christopher Dowrick

Section 1             

1.                   New and emerging mental health challenges. Issues arising from novel threats, including the war in Ukraine and the resulting refugee crisis, as well as climate change.   

Christos Lionis and Christopher Dowrick

2.                   Long COVID and Mental Health: Characterization, Treatment Options, Implications for Service Delivery, and Recommendations for Delivery.

Heather Rogers and Christos Lionis

3.                   Mental health in the post-COVID period: a global health challenge.  

Marilena Anastasakis and Christos Lionis

Section 2             

4.                   Mental health and remote consultations. Transferring evidence and experience to low-resource settings.        

Flavio Dias Silva and Darien Alfa Cipta

5.                   Mental Health for primary care professionals. The role and leadership of management and health systems in mental health promotion in working settings.        

Darien Alfa Cipta, Juan Mendive and Heather Rogers

6.                   Priorities for primary mental care in low-resource settings. Implementing sustainable approaches to mental healthcare delivery in settings with traditionally low motivation for mental healthcare.            

Alfredo de Oliveira Neto, Joseph A. Ariba and Abdullah Dukhail AIKhathami

7.                   Improving interface between generalists and psychiatrists.

Abdullah AIKhathami and Ana B. Perez Villalva

Section 3

               

8.                   End of life. The new paradigm that has been developed in response to COVID-19 with a focus on home and palliative care. 

James Jackson, Christos Lionis and Juan Mendive

9.                   Thanatophobia: exacerbation/amplification of existing anxiety disorders/phobias with a focus on GP’s key role in encouraging patients to seek help and adhere to healthy behaviors.  

Abdullah AIKhathami, Christos Lionis and Ana B. Perez Villalva

10.               Child Mental Health

Flavio Dias Silva, Laura Canessa, Deepika Shaligram and Ana B. Perez Villalva

This insightful and timely book equips family doctors and other primary healthcare professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to address a diverse range of new and important challenges in the field of primary mental health care, including ongoing impacts from the COVID pandemic, thanatophobia, and end-of life care, humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophes, and the effects of climate change.

There is an emphasis throughout on the need to encourage and so reap the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration between family doctors and mental health specialists, and across the range of primary care and community workers. Effective primary healthcare relies increasingly on the use of remote consultations, and the book explains how the potential of remote working can be maximized in low-resource settings. The book concludes with a consideration of how to protect and enhance the mental health of primary care workers in the face of these ongoing challenges in care.

Key Features:

• Global and inclusive, providing practical guidance and direction across low-, middle-, and high-income settings, satisfying the needs of all primary care practitioners regardless of geography
• Focused on key and immediate challenges for primary care practitioners arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty, and social inequality, migration, and climate change
• Addresses the vital importance of self-care by and of primary healthcare workers facing unprecedented work and emotional pressures

Reflecting the expertise of the WONCA Working Party for Mental Health (WWPMH), building on the foundations laid in the 2020 WONCA volume Global Primary Mental Health Care, the editors and contributors all have expertise in primary mental health care at the frontline, with backgrounds in family medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and nursing.