We hope this book will be a useful resource for anyone who is interested in the management of common mental health problems in the primary care setting. Anxiety and depression are common and often overlap, and patients who suffer from these symptoms are usually managed in primary care.
We have drawn on our clinical experience, working in primary and secondary care, and across the interface. We have used ‘cases’ of fictitious characters interlinked by living in one street to illustrate the breadth of problems under the umbrella of ‘anxiety and depression’, reflecting our professional experiences. We hope that this makes the book appealing to a broad range of readers, including students of health and social care professions, general practitioners and primary care nurses, and practitioners working in specialist care and the voluntary (or ‘third’) sector.
Above all, we would like this text to contribute to an improvement in the care of people with anxiety and depression in the future.