Dr Thurston is a psychiatrist at Oxford who has worked in assertive outreach for many years. He discusses the benefits of assertive outreach and their place in modern psychiatry and gives an overview of how psychiatry has changed over the past 20 years. Kindly produced by Mr Wayne Davies. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/