ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the concept of complexity as it relates to the mental health provision within primary care. It describes a new primary care service that has been set up in City and Hackney to provide a response to the challenge of complexity by supporting General Practitioners and providing a clinical service to patients. Patients’ complexity appears as a multiplicity of mental health diagnoses, as a combination of mental and physical health problems, often coupled with a background of social difficulties, neglect, and trauma. In the context of mental health care, complexity can be understood on three levels: in the patients’ presentation, in the interventions used to help patients with specific conditions, and in the provision of health care. The issue of patient complexity can be addressed either by developing interventions of matching complexity or by using interventions that, by virtue of the psychotherapeutic principles on which they are based, are well placed to explore this complexity.
