Everybody be cool

You don't have to be a psychiatric patient to benefit from mindfulness. The world is mostly "mad" and we can all benefit from being aware of how we are reacting to that world. A fancy modern name for ancient wisdom (esp in Buddhism) Gareth Lloyd

Frankly, Sir, you are talking through you ill informed hat. As an ex- mental health specialist, whose life and career was laid low by chronic pain; whose hormone system was subject to permanent iatrogenic insult, I have found mindfulness exercises (combined with physical ones) the most fruitful way of managing my pain and, hence, my life. But in one thing, I will agree with you. I cannot for the life of me, see how it can be "prescribed" and delivered in a generic mental health setting. Further, I cannot see how a psychiatric, medical model, could incorporate this strategy. Once one sets "goals" for mindfulness work, its whole approach is undermined. Mindfulness is most successful when it is not aimed at "getting somewhere" but at looking seriously at "where you are". Any improvement in symptoms cannot be predicated. Personally, I have found that it improved my life and alowed me to reduce opiates dramatically. But I could not have done this as a preset goal. By undertaking mindfulness work (at the suggestion of a clinician) I stepped outside the world of care plans, treatment goals and cures, into one where I had to accept my condition, examine my lifestyle, renounce the anger which was feeding into my symptoms and take responsibility and control from the medical world. I started this route with a self-funded mindfullness course, but all these "improvements" have taken 2-3 years to manifest themselves. It is not a route for those who want you, as a GP, to take it all away and I can understand your mystification. Ian Holliday

Author makes few 'off the cuff' remarks about Psychiatry and that really riles me. Psychiatry as practised in this country is a highly professional and evidence based humane treatment strategies which deal with a cohort of people who are ill understood and the speciality is the proverbial 'Cinderella services'! The snide remarks could be directed to 'Psychological therapies' which have been conceptualised and exported to rest of the world by our transatlantic cousins who specialise in misusing the English language!
As someone who moved seamlessly to mental health and returned to primary care back again with a diploma, I can sympathise with the incredulity one is confronted with from the average GP. There are many who still equate psychiaty with Voodoo!
While I do acknowledge that this column is written with a Very Large tongue in cheek there are too many GP Trainers, principles,opinion makers and the like who harbour this kind of ill informed opinions about Psychiatry and the term is VERY LOOSELY interchanged with Psychology.
R. M.

Careful, Copperfield!
They're beginning to take you seriously!
Vic Bradbury Victor Bradbury

Dr Copperfield's registrar asks 'what the f**k is mindfulness'?
<p>
Perhaps a perusal of Dr Jonty Heaversedge's contribution and personal perspective in the pages of Pulse, may enlighten him.
<p>
http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=19&storycode=4124805 paul steeper