Nick Bouras

Reflections on the Challenges of Psychiatry in the UK and Beyond is a personal journey though British psychiatry, the NHS and academic life for over 40 years. It describes personal experience as perceived by a postgraduate student, practicing clinician, teacher, trainer, researcher and health service manager. This book presents a personal historical chronicle and a panoramic view of some of the most significant milestones of modern psychiatry. The process of developing mental health services including those for people with intellectual disabilities through a maze of policies, sometimes contradictory, but also with strong ideological, sociological and political encounters proved to be a foremost challenge. The author examines the complex connections of these processes and he succeeds in giving a comprehensive picture of the mental health map in over four decades. Successes and disappointments are featured throughout Reflections on the Challenges of Psychiatry in the UK and Beyond through memories, archives and personal statements. Reflections on the Challenges of Psychiatry in the UK and Beyond will be of interest to all mental health professionals, all other health practitioners, policy makers, commissioners and managers as well to lay people. This book can be used in courses for psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, therapists, health and social policy.

People with intellectual disability often have health needs that go unrecognised and untreated; this may be because of difficulties in communication, diagnostic overshadowing, discrimination or indifference. There is concern that public health measures aimed at reducing the main health killers in the population will not address these issues for people with intellectual disability and may preferentially widen the inequality that already exists. This book is a comprehensive and systematic review of physical and mental health co-morbidities in people with intellectual disability. Such an evidence base is vital in shaping public health policy, healthcare commissioning and the development of more effective healthcare systems, as well as supporting better understanding and practice at an individual clinical level. This is essential reading for policy makers and commissioners of services, as well as individual practitioners across mainstream and specialist health and social care, in considering not only service developments but practice at the coalface.