The compassionate mind approach to supporting psychological wellbeing in people living with HIV.

There is a growing body of evidence exploring the health, psychological and social benefits of compassion-focused therapy (CFT) for managing complex issues such as shame, loneliness, stigma and disease adjustment. As a component of CFT, compassionate mind training (CMT) has been found to bring about significant reductions in psychological distress and improvements in levels of compassion, emotion regulation and wellbeing. There is also growing evidence for how these approaches can bring benefits across a variety of psychological and physical health difficulties, including HIV.

Prevalence of HIV in mental health service users: a retrospective cohort study.

Objective: To examine the prevalence of HIV in a cohort of people who have used secondary mental health services in the UK.

Design: Retrospective cohort study.

Setting: Routinely collected clinical data from secondary mental health services in South London, UK available for research through the Clinical Record Interactive Search tool at the National Institute for Health and Care Research Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre were matched with pseudonymised national HIV surveillance data held by the UK Health Security Agency using a deterministic matching algorithm.