Community Mental Health Teams: A Guide to Current Practices
Abstract
Community Mental Health Teams: A Guide to Current Practices offers an overview of the current provision of mental health services in Britain. Although teams from other parts of the world are mentioned, the British system dominates the book. Tom Burns, the sole author, states his reasons for this approach in the preface: it enables him to scrutinize the difference between what is published about a given service (such as assertive outreach) and what actually happens on such teams. The book is intended as a guide, not a manual, so although some detail is included, that is not the author's emphasis. Rather, Burns offers his observations about how teams are structured and what seems to work well or poorly on given teams. Also, his book is more experiential and less an evidence-based guide. Burns, a social psychiatrist, first gives a brief history of deinstitutionalization in Britain as an introduction to the development of modern community mental health teams. Next, he describes various teams from the "generic" community mental health team to specialized teams such as the early intervention teams, which target persons with first-break or recent-onset schizophrenia. The book has the feel of a Tom Burns lecture, and there