BJPsych Bulletin

Summary Bowlby’s Maternal Care and Mental Health and its abridgement Child Care and the Growth of Love present two claims. The first (MCMH1) holds that children develop better mental health when they experience care from at least one familiar caregiver. The second (MCMH2) states that a child’s development and well-being depend on their mother’s constant presence and attention. Archival material s…

The study highlights an innovative intervention that champions transformative learning, an aspect that is often overlooked in traditional medical education.

We always treat fluent language as a marker of intelligence and trustworthiness, often independent of factual accuracy. Large language models (LLMs) exploit this bias by producing confident, human-like texts that are perceived as intelligent and trustworthy, even when they lack accurate contextual understanding or are factually incorrect. This creates particular risks in mental healthcare, where …

Group-based, multi-component interventions that include a psychological element produced the greatest reductions in weight and BMI. Future research should focus on refining and embedding psychologically informed, multi-component group programmes into routine psychiatric care to optimise long-term physical health outcomes.

The authors propose a paradigm shift toward recovery-oriented, co-created language that centres epistemic justice. Clinical discourse should promote therapeutic optimism and support inclusive, patient-centred care. Recovery-focused language can strengthen engagement, improve outcomes and support a treatment culture grounded in mutual respect and hope.

The findings emphasise the urgent need for accessible, culturally appropriate and sustained mental health interventions. Longitudinal research is needed to understand long-term trajectories and inform comprehensive support systems.

Despite being a rare phenomenon, children who kill galvanise extraordinary amounts of conversation about why they did it, how to deal with them and how to prevent recurrences. The debate quickly becomes polarised and occasionally politicised, often without nuanced consideration of the benefits and costs of proceeding in one direction or another. A scientific approach would begin with the question…

The findings indicate a higher than expected prevalence of neurodivergent conditions in people with FND. Enhanced early identification and tailored treatment approaches are likely to be crucial for improving clinical outcomes and patient experiences in neuropsychiatric settings.

Strengths- and community-oriented Recovery Colleges have similar service user student populations. Certain groups that may be underrepresented in Recovery Colleges and Recovery College research include older adults, men, those with developmental disorders and ethnic minority populations.

Treatment non-adherence is associated with markedly poorer clinical outcomes, emphasising the importance of early identification and targeted interventions to support adherence.

In its 2025 medical training review, National Health Service (NHS) England highlighted the urgent need to modernise postgraduate medical education in England to meet NHS population needs while supporting doctors' professional aspirations. The psychiatry of intellectual disability, a subspecialty marked by declining recruitment, uneven service provision and limited research capacity, provides a cr…

Between the 1970s and 1990s, Brian Barraclough's research on clinical and social aspects of suicide contributed enormously to our understanding of the subject.

Embedding brief, semi-structured prompts into the MSE is a feasible training-aligned approach to improve detection, support curriculum modernisation and enhance patient safety.

Based on our results, psychiatrists are generally keen to use outcome measures, but are often prevented from doing so effectively by pressures on services and lack of appropriate support. The Royal College of Psychiatrists and other relevant organisations could enhance the use of outcome measures in mental health services through improved guidance, providing additional resources and integration o…

Routine EHR data performed well in predicting the risk of high-cost care, potentially enabling targeted interventions and more efficient resource allocation.

Debate about borderline personality disorder (BPD) has intensified, with some proposing its absorption into complex post-traumatic stress disorder and others questioning whether the diagnosis is harmful. These debates often obscure the central issue of construct validity. This paper evaluates whether BPD constitutes a coherent clinical entity. Drawing on Robins and Guze's classic diagnostic valid…