Images of Psychiatry

About the Images of Psychiatry campaign

Promoting understanding of mental health issues and psychiatry is a core element of the College’s public education responsibility.

The Images of Psychiatry campaign will build on the successful work of the Partners in Care and Changing Minds campaigns to ensure that service user and carer issues, and the fight against stigma, continue to be priorities for the College.

The campaign will also take the message that psychiatry is a modern, exciting and challenging field of medicine to students and their teachers, both in schools and universities, and encourage mature entrants to medical schools from amongst people with experience of mental health issues, for example through family experience, as a carer or as a mental health professional.

The campaign has five main objectives:

To increase awareness amongst young people of psychiatry as a modern, therapeutic medical discipline which supports recovery.

To ensure user and carer issues are core to psychiatry as a discipline, from training to everyday practice, and that the outcomes of the Partners in Care campaign continue to be supported.

To ensure mental health is covered in the school curriculum in relevant subjects, and as a cross cutting theme, to ensure that pupils are aware of mental health issues and can make an informed choice about a career in mental health.

To raise the number of UK medical students choosing psychiatry as their first choice career to 10%.

To ensure that stigma associated with psychiatry and mental illness has been reduced as evidenced by a national opinion poll in 2008 compared with 2003 and 1998.