General Physical Health Advice for People with Serious Mental Illness

It has been established that people with serious mental illness have higher rates of mortality and morbidity from physical health problems than the average individual. There are a variety of reasons for this ranging from the side effects of medication to unhealthy lifestyle choices. In recent years, there has been substantial effort to focus on this problem by monitoring physical health and offering advice on ways to reduce and morbidity. As physicians and care workers to people with serious mental illness, we are becoming increasingly responsible for addressing this problem, partly by the provision of general physical health advice, the effectiveness of which has yet to be proven.