Psychotherapy and mental health teams

Mental health teams in different configurations and settings are under increasing pressure to offer formal psychotherapies as well as psychologically informed management to large numbers of 'difficult' patients with severe and complex presentations. This pressure has arisen variously from consumers, governmental agencies and commissioning bodies. Although these teams are an important resource, they receive limited training, supervision or support in models of psychotherapy, especially those incorporating a relational dimension and offering a coherent 'common language'. This commonly results in impairment of collective team function, including the quality and consistency of assessments, and may result in stress, splitting and 'burn out' for team members. This situation is due in part to their burden of casework and responsibility but also to prevailing, largely symptom-based and biomedical, models of mental disorder which tend to minimize the importance of psychosocial dimensions in either actiology or treatment. Formulating and delivering appropriate, evidence-based and robust models of psychotherapy in generic team settings represents a significantly different challenge from that posed by delivery of psychotherapy in specialist settings. Approaches to this important challenge are discussed and summarized drawing on general considerations and the limited direct research evidence, and are illustrated by a cognitive analytic therapy (CAT)-based training project.