Welcome to the 22nd WCP Congress Program Scheduling

While evidence-based treatment options exist for all mental disorders, not all patients respond to them. These patients with severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI) typically have a low quality of life and a shortened life expectancy. With the number of unsuccessful treatment attempts mounting, the odds for succeeding with yet another attempt become lower and lower. In recent years, a scientific debate on whether the concept of futility may aptly describe some of these dire clinical situations has emerged. Knowledge on how to best care for SPMI patients when further curative treatment seems futile is very limited, both regarding empirical findings and accepted approaches or guidelines. Since many patients with SPMI meet the WHO criteria for requiring palliative care (i.e. most importantly, loss of quality of life in the face of a life-threatening disease), a new subdiscipline called ‘Palliative Psychiatry’ has been proposed as a framework for developing SPMI-specific care approaches. Palliative Psychiatry aims at maximizing quality of life through means other than symptom reduction. This symposium offers an conceptual overview of futility and its possible adaption in psychiatry, an introduction to Palliative Psychiatry as a framework for coping productively with futility in psychiatry, and the results of a qualitative study with anorexia nervosa experts as example of futility judgments in psychiatry and their practical implications.