Challenges in Primary Mental Health Care : Models for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

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.

Christos Lionis is Professor Emeritus of General Practice and Primary Health Care, Laboratory of Health and Society, School of Medicine, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece.

Christopher Dowrick is Emeritus Professor of Primary Medical Care at the University of Liverpool, UK.