Question

TUT urpose of this discussion is to examine now history impacts our under cussion Expectations ow the 3-Step Plan and Student Checklist to meet the Discussion Grading Rubric expectations ue Wednesday at 11:59 pm EST. ep 1: Read the Discussion Background: he history covered in this week's reading traces how beliefs about helping others have changed over time. For example, the belets and treatments for some ental illness like schizophrenia were quite different in the 1800's in comparison to beliefs and treatments today Step 2: Create a new thread and answer all three parts of the initial prompt below. 1. Describe your opinion about how people suffering from mentalitness were viewed prior to the Middle Ages. Refer to Ch.3) 2. Imagine you were alive in the Middle Ages and knew someone with a mental iness Explain how would you help them get their mental health needs met 3. Describe how peoples current views of mentalness has changed from the Middle Ages Due Sunday at 11:59 pm EST. Step 3: Reply to two people on different days. Reply to your classmates instructor by introducing a new dea that applies personal experences and or new knowledge ganed from course on me • Need help with creating series? ad 3 For example reply to one person on Thursday and a differenberson on Saturday o e P here to search

Answer 1

1. The term ‘mental health’ was popularised in the early 1900s by physicians, social reformers and former asylum patients. They wanted to reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness, and said ‘illness’ reinforced prejudices against asylum patients because it implied segregation between the sick and the well. Focusing on health countered a persistent misconception that only some people are prone to psychiatric problems.   

   Christianity’s influence on mental health care remained dominant for centuries. For example, clergyman Francis Willis famously treated King George III. The York Retreat, founded by Quakers in the 1790s, was the most influential asylum of its time. It was one of the first private asylums to shun physical restraint and coercion. Its new methods, grounded more in religion than medicine, were called ‘moral treatment’, in deliberate contrast to ‘medical treatment’.

   Asylums multiplied throughout Europe and North America in the 1800s and psychiatry became a recognised medical speciality. Scientific understanding of what physicians still called ‘lunacy’ had increased little since the 1600s, but medical men used the asylum boom to gain practical experience with patients. They drew on the increasing prestige of science and established themselves as publicly recognised experts on mental illness and its treatment. Critics argued asylum cure rates were exaggerated.

   Many asylums were crowded, hopeless places by the early 1900s, increasingly separated from the outside world. These isolated institutions became testing grounds for controversial and dangerous treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and lobotomy. Such treatments helped some patients, but they reinforced the idea that asylums were places no-one wanted to end up. Asylums did not survive criticism in the 1970s from ex-patients, feminists and the antipsychiatry movement. Psychiatry’s focus has since moved from asylums to pharmaceuticals.

   Optimists in the 1980s and 1990s hailed new technologies. These included specially targeted drugs like SSRIs, brain scanning techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and more consistent disease definitions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). They were evidence to some that psychiatry had finally become based in hard, objective science. Critics argued such developments reflected the growing power of American psychiatry and Big Pharma, not scientific progress   The modern stereotype that in the Middle Ages there was a general belief that mental illness was caused by sin is reviewed. The authors examined 57 descriptions of mental illness (madness, possession, alcoholism, epilepsy, and combinations thereof) from pre-Crusade chronicles and saints' lives. In only 9 (16%) of these descriptions did the sources attribute the mental illness to sin or wrongdoing, and in these cases the medieval authors appeared to use this attribution for its propaganda value against an enemy of their patron saints, their monastery lands, or their religious values. The medieval sources indicate that the authors were well aware of the proximate causes of mental illness, such as humoral imbalance, intemperate diet and alcohol intake, overwork, and grief. The banality that, since God causes all things he also causes mental illness, was only used by medieval authors under special circumstances and in a minority of cases. It does not constitute evidence of superstitious and primitive notions about mental illness in the early Middle Ages.

2. Promoting help-seeking for mental health problems can result in improved treatment rates. For the most impact, social marketing interventions need to be tailored to targeted demographic subgroups. We investigated the influence of interactions between attitudes toward treatment and age, gender, ethnicity/race and education for both general medical and specialty care.   Greater comfort talking to a professional was associated with greater past-year specialty care across all demographic groups, while strongest for non-Latino whites and not evident for those 50–64 years old. For all demographic groups, reported willingness to seek professional help was associated with general medical care. However, for specialty care the association was much stronger for men compared to women. For African Americans, but not non-Latino whites, the perceived efficacy of mental health treatment improved the likelihood of past-year specialty use. Younger adults and males often report more negative attitudes toward mental health treatment, as compared to middle-aged adults and females [8]. Young adults may have worse attitudes because they are fearful about the nature of mental health treatment [9]. Females may not necessarily show more positive attitudes toward mental health treatment within ethnic/racial minority groups. A study of Mexican Americans found females to have more positive attitudes toward help seeking [10], while other studies have reported that U.S. African American and Latino males and females did not differ in certain attitudes toward mental health treatment       

3. Other societal changes have contributed to greater public awareness of mental health issues as well. The media, with the creation of magazine and newspaper health and science sections, health-related television programming, and specialty magazines such as Psychology Today, have helped to demystify many psychological and mental health issues for millions of Americans. New psychotropic medicines have been developed in the past two decades to help persons with mental illness. Also, the stigma associated with seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist has lessened. Americans, in casual conversations with friends, family, and even strangers, are much more likely now than perhaps at any other time in this country's history to admit that “they are seeing someone” to help sort out emotional or psychological problems. In addition, many employers, recognizing the need for employee mental health care, now have health insurance plans to cover some costs associated with psychiatric care. ² Finally, the American public has benefited from public education programs conducted by various mental health organizations.

   A higher education level may improve attitudes toward mental health treatment [16, 31], a finding likely related to increased awareness of the benefits of mental health treatments. A lower education level is associated with a greater likelihood of seeking mental health care in a general medical setting, as opposed to a specialty service setting [31, 32]. Persons with lower education levels may have had less exposure to specialty mental health treatment due to economic or social constraints.

   Attitudes toward mental health treatment may be more strongly associated with specialty care than general medical care [6]. To follow through with specialty care, a certain attitudinal set may be required [33]. In general medical settings, a person may have sought care initially for a medical reason, requiring no prerequisite attitude. Or, attitudes associated with receptivity to general medical care for emotional problems may not yet have been adequately studied. Attitudes toward mental health treatment are more positive with previous treatment, also known as the ‘contact hypothesis

   Thus, as the issues of mental illness have become demystified yet more complex, other groups of professionals—journalists, geographers, urban planners, and public opinion analysts—have been attracted to the study of Americans' attitudes toward issues involving mental health and mental illness. In the summer of 1989 the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Program on Chronic Mental Illness approached Daniel Yankelovich and DYG, Inc., to conduct a major research project on Americans' attitudes toward locating housing for people with chronic mental illness in residential neighborhoods. ³ The foundation recognized that many communities have resisted the location of all types of facilities in various neighborhoods—the “Not-in-My-Back-Yard” (NIMBY) phenomenon. The foundation wanted to provide the nine cities in its program as well as the American public with an in-depth understanding of the resistance to and acceptance of housing facilities for persons with mental illness. The intention was that with a greater understanding of the issues, these nine programs would be better equipped to address and overcome the NIMBY phenomenon.