National Director for Mental Health

A message from Louis Appleby

The last ten years have seen unprecedented progress in mental health services. During this period, I have visited many excellent and innovative services and met numerous service users and frontline staff. I have seen, and heard, for myself the ways in which the lives of people with mental health problems have changed for the better.

Among the many areas of progress are:

• the expansion of community care - we now have almost 750 new specialist mental health teams providing appropriate and timely crisis care in people’s homes, effective support for those experiencing a first episode of psychosis, and an assertive outreach service for those with persistent mental health problems who may not always access services in the usual way
• new drug treatments  - recent developments have  resulted in new treatments which have fewer side effects
• suicide prevention –  suicide rates in England are now the lowest on record
• improvements to inpatient ward environments – in many parts of the country wards that were previously impoverished, both physically and therapeutically, have now been rebuilt or refurbished