Is it possible to detect future risk of psychosis from a patient’s primary care consultation history?

 

 

By Dr Sarah Sullivan
Research Fellow
Centre for Academic Primary Care

Psychosis is a serious and long-term mental illness. Unfortunately, for many sufferers the outcomes are poor. Many may relapse again after recovery, suffer long-term residual symptoms and have poor social functioning.

Primary care is an important part of the care pathway for patients with psychosis, so GPs need to be able to accurately identify those at high risk. The task is difficult because high-risk symptoms are frequently not specific to psychosis.

We also know that the greater the delay between someone’s first psychotic symptom and receiving specialist mental health treatment is associated with poorer outcomes. GPs play an important role in this, because most people are referred to mental health services by their GP.

In a study recently published in JAMA Network Open, we set out to find out if people had previously consulted their GP … Read more