Letter to the editor: prevention is better than cure: a reply to McKenzie, March et al. and Selten & Cantor-Graae

ABSTRACT

We are grateful to the commentators for their constructive observations on our review. We agree with Kwame McKenzie (2009) that consensus needs to be built ; the key point we attempted to make is that, to gain such a consensus, the problem of high rates of psychosis in migrant and minority ethnic populations needs to be de-coupled from the no less important issue of service provision for minority ethnic patients. In the same way that improving customer services for insurance claimants following an accident is irrelevant to reducing the rate at which such accidents occur, so reforming mental health services (important as this no doubt is) will have no impact on population rates of disorder.