Question: who does the mental health diagnoses and treatments research go to help?

Lauren Burns answered on 18 Jun 2018:

This is a great question! It actually helps a number of people; 1) the people with a mental health illness, 2) clinicians, 3) the NHS. It helps people with a mental health illness because misdiagnoses and treatment errors can cause negative side effects to already vulnerable people, therefore reducing these errors means they can work on getting well, sooner. It helps the clinicians because they are swamped with seeing so many people, if we can assist them in getting the right diagnosis or right treatment first time around, then we can hopefully free up their time because patients won’t be coming back as often. It can help the NHS as a whole because misdiagnoses and treatment errors are costly, if we can reduce these errors, we can reduce the costs on the NHS, making the spending more cost effective 🙂