RN's All in the Mind explored psychiatry, slightly out of my area of interest. But this is what I got out of the podcast.
There's the sense that psychiatry needs to change
That digital phenotyping (the way smartphones can track our activity or lack of) offers the possibility to use our behaviours as a way to monitor ourselves and for other people to observe environmental impacts on behaviours, and our responses to particular incidences.
The program also identified that relationships are critical, "the real meat of mental health... both in terms of where our problems come from and how they are solved", and that we live in the social world of interactions.
Finally, one of the guests stated that psychiatry needs to recognise the non-technical aspects of mental health where people start to become the experts and that there needs to be a shift towards a more democratic and genuine dialogue with people who are involved in psychiatric services.
It seems that people using services were forgotten for the longest time. Aged care is moving towards 'consumer-directed' care although this philosophy is not clearly implemented; the NDIS offers a consumer-driven approach although the intermediaries can be problematic. Mental health has some way to go. I'm really disappointed with the commissioning of mental health services in residential care as it's still prescriptive in its design.