The Department of Health should stop focusing on counting treatment episodes and targets and should concentrate instead on outcomes. This call for a new direction in mental health policy appears in a National Audit Office (NAO) report, which contains a detailed assessment of the achievements to date of crisis resolution and home treatment teams in England (see page 6). For me, there are echoes of the NAO view in a newly-published book by American sociologist Richard Sennett. In The Craftsman Sennett, who holds professorships at New York University and the London School of Economics, shows a firm grasp of historical trends, delving at will into the worlds of philosophy, economics, human creativity, the arts and technology to make his points. He warns that all of us lose a connection with craftsmanship at our peril and that the modern obsession with mechanical, quantitative measures rather than qualitative approaches is backfiring.