A Case Study Of Mental Health

A Case Study Of Mental Health Mental health has become a major global problem. It affects 450 million people and one in four of us will suffer from mental ill- health at some time in our lives (WHO, 2001). Mental Health is † used positively to indicate a state of psychological well- being, negatively to indicate its opposite ( as in ‘mental health problems’) or euphemistically to indicate facilities used by, or imposed upon , people with mental health problems ( as in ‘mental health services’). During the nineteenth century, all patients were certified under lunacy laws. That is, the State only made provisions for the control of madness. The fledgling profession of psychiatry ( this term was first used in Britain in 1858) was singularly preoccupied with segregating and managing lunatics . With the emergence of the First World War, soldiers began to break down with ‘shellshock’ now called ‘post – traumatic stress disorder’ . From this point on, psyc hiatry extended its jurisdiction from madness to versions of nervousness provoked by stress or trauma. In the twentieth century, more abnormal mental states came within its jurisdiction, such as those due to alcohol and drug abuse and personality problems. Today, ‘mental health services’ may be offered to, or be imposed upon, people with this wide range of problems, although madness or ‘severe mental illness’ still captures most of the attention of professionals .Another aspects of the term ‘mental health problems’ is that some people, critical of psychiatric terminology, object of scientific or logical grounds to notions like ‘mental illness’ or ‘mental disorder’. In the 1983 Act and equivalent Scottish legislation ‘ mental illness’ is not defined. However, Article 3(1) of the Northern Ireland Order does define it as ‘ a state of mind which affects a person’s thinking, perceiving, emotion or judgement to the extent that he requires care or medical treatment in his own interests of other persons’. Neither the Scottish nor Northern Ireland definitions include psychopathic disorder and there has recently been some discussion in the context of review of the Mental Health Act about removing it in England and Wales. Issues concerning mental health have been raised substantially in the consciousness of politicians, the media, and the public. Moreover, the ‘burden’ of mental disorder is regarded not just as a – if not the- principal cause of human misery, but as a significant impediment to social and economic growth. Measurement of the years of potential life lost and the years of productive life lost through mental ill- health could reach 15% of all diseases and deaths globally by 2020 (WHO, 1999). A further dimension of inequalities in the apparent scale of mental health problems is race. Race is controversial to define. Genetic distinctions between groups of humans ( other based on sex) have little empirical basis. Racial distinctions arose from anthropological investigations carried out by colonized indigenous people. However, because of colonization, the social identity of these people became real for them and others. In the United States black patients are overrepresented in mental institutions, and have become increasingly so over the postwar period. This has particularly been the case within state mental hospitals, where minority groups constitute 35 per cent of the hospital population, and are subject to higher rates of admission and readmission. In a review of eight epidemiological studies conducted in the United States between the late 1950’s and mid- 1970’s, Kessler and Neighbors (1986) found that among persons with low incomes black people exhibited significantly more distress than white people. They claimed, therefore, that race is an important independent variable in determining the likelihood of an individual becoming mentally ill. There is some dispute over what to make of this evidence. Cockerham (1990) maintains that the majority of studies on the incidence and distribution of mental health problems suggest that race is not an independent variable:†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ race alone does not appear to produce higher rates of mental disorder for particular groups’. Rather, it is because more black people are in the lower social cases that they tend to demonstrate more signs of mental distress. Others, however, disagree. Halpern (1993) argues that minority status can be demonstrated to result in a tendency towards psychiatric problems.