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Occupational therapy units not only helped patients recover their confidence so they could return to the community but they also provided respite for the long term mentally ill patients and their families. In many areas these resources have been shut down, replaced by a waiting list for a course of half a dozen one hour counselling sessions.
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● continued. Because day patients no longer have access to these resources and because day centres and day hospitals have been shut down they are being left isolated and vulnerable in the community.
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So pleased to see that the Guardian are at last promoting OT as it should be. I work as a lead
OT with veterans with PTSD, and quite often we will get thanked for saving their lives. What people see is an "activity" and therefore can confuse us with activity co­ordinators, but our interventions are far more complex than this. We listen to our clients narratives, for want of a better term we walk in their shoes, and then come up with a solution to the problem, with the input of the client (we call this person centred). We are not there to entertain our clients or have referrals because someone is bored, but we are in essence life coaches. Occupation is a word that for many means employment, but Occupation to us is anything that a human does that is meaningful to