News Release, 16 July 2003
The Mental Health Foundation is encouraging mental health service users and survivors to set up their own community-based mental health crisis services with the launch of The Crisis Project Workbook today.
The work book comes on the back of the report, Being There in a Crisis, launched last year that called for national investment to help establish community-based crisis services for people with severe mental health problems to use wherever and whenever they need them.
It is estimated that up to 1.5% of the adult population experiences severe mental health problems (including long term clinical depression, manic depression, psychosis, schizophrenia and severe eating disorders). Every year there are over 100,000 admissions to hospital for severe mental health problems - admissions that are often precipitated by a crisis.
The workbook supports the findings of the report by offering practical guidelines and help to service users/survivors wanting to set up user-friendly, non-medical alternatives to hospital for people in crisis. It is based on the experience of seven voluntary sector projects that were part of the Mental Health Foundation's Adult Crisis Service Development Programme, which ran from 1997-2002.
Dr Andrew McCulloch, the Chief Executive of the Mental Health Foundation, said: "The Crisis Workbook can help service users set up practical and effective community-based alternatives to hospital for people with mental health problems in crisis. Statutory services need to work with voluntary sector organisations and service users to develop different approaches at a local level."
Jan Wallcraft, Expert by Experience Fellow, NIMHE, and former Crisis Service Development Programme manager, said: "The projects which formed the Crisis Programme have shown that voluntary sector alternatives do work, and that service users can be centrally involved in running them. I hope the lessons of these projects can provide the basis for a much larger national programme supporting many more similar initiatives."
"With research and anecdotal evidence continually documenting the shortcomings of hospital in-patient care, we need to ensure that alternative and complementary crisis services, for which service users have been calling for many years, become more widely available."
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For further information and interview requests contact please contact the press office on 020 7803 1105 / 1128 or email the press office
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