Training general practitioners in mental health skills.

In the UK about 40% of British General Practitioners (GPs) train formally in a psychiatric post as part of the two years of specialist attachment in their training (Pereira Gray, 1995) but the training needs of future GPs are quite different from those of psychiatrists. A few months working in a psychiatric unit, where the focus is on the management of acute and chronic psychotic illness, does not appear to provide GPs in training with the knowledge and skills that they perceive that they will need for working in primary care (Williams, 1998). Similar comments could undoubtedly be made about the content of many undergraduate psychiatric curricula which continue to focus on the 'major' mental disorders, and fail to integrate mental health training with general hospital and general practice training where students may sea, but fail to recognise, any other patients with quite different types of mental disorder from those that they have learned about with their psychiatric attachment. Surveys of the perceived