Within 24 hours of a person’s mental health crisis, open dialogue aims to provide a safe space for family, friends and mental health practitioner to come together and try to make sense of the experience. It is often in a home or a non-clinical setting. Using open-ended questions, such as: ‘how would you like to use your time today?’ It feels less like an interview for a diagnosis and more of a collaboration between people with differing expertise, whether personal or professional.
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It is well documented that community and a strong support network can be powerful agents of recovery. Looking at World Health Organization data on outcomes for psychosis, for example, people who live in low-income countries often have better outcomes than people in the UK.

While this response is often mistakenly tied to an absence of medication, the key elements are social togetherness, dignity, and a safe place to heal. Open dialogue, in other words, might help introduce these core principles into wealthier countries that have become over-medicalised in their approach to mental health care. By formalising the ‘social network approach’ through rigorous testing and data, we may return to a model of care that happens by default in countries outside of the western world.

Anyone here familiar with this approach? I am asking for people struggling with expensive, privatised and fossilised #psychiatry here in #Poland, and even more in #Ukraine.
#MentalHealth #OpenDialog #Psychiatry #community #support