Dialogue

Today’s training was in substance use and mental health delivered by Forward Leeds. Lots of interesting learning around substance (mis)use and the interrelation to mental health. Although the training didn’t go into comorbidity and dual diagnosis, it did highlight that it’s not straight forward to determine whether certain symptoms are caused by mental illness or drug use, and whether mental illness leads to drug use or drug use leads to mental illness. It’s not straight forward to ascertain from dialogue alone due complexities in individual’s perception of their own health needs, but dialogue is at the core of working with individuals from first contact through to treatment.