Mental Health And Mental Illness

Forget all the stereotypes of mental illness. It has no face. It has no particular victim. Mental illness can affect an individual from any background and the black community is no exception. African Americans sometimes experience even more severe forms of mental health conditions because of unmet needs and barriers to treatment. According to the Office of Minority Health, African Americans are 20 percent more likely to experience serious mental health problems than the general population. That’s why UGA third year Majenneh Sengbe is taking action as the co-founder of her upcoming organization Black Minds Daily.

Those factors are mostly caused by the lack of knowledge (Agar, Hoise, Lobb, Davidson & Phillips, 2014). Because of this, the future of nursing practice will be impacted. According to Happell & Platania-phung (2004), Nurses in general medicine and acute/sub-acute need to be educated about mental illness and how to assist patient with mental illness efficiently. Gaining knowledge can reduce the fear when looking after patients with mental illnesses (Godwin, 2009). By gaining knowledge, nurses can understand about guideline and safety approaches when they are looking elderly patients with mental illness. Nurses will also able to gain knowledge about factors that activating specific negative believe from patients which will trigger negative responses, such as depression, anxiety, and paranoid. By understanding this, prejudice thoughts from nurses about elderly patients with mental health disorder can be challenged and change positively .Furthermore, increase education about elderlies’ mental illnesses for future nurses can be one way to increase the number of nurses interested in mental health. The same as current nurses, education can help student nurses to gain knowledge about mental health thus reduce fear and prejudice thought about the behaviour of elderly with mental illness. This will assist in positively changing the point of

According to Merriam-Webster, mental health illness is described as a broad range of medical conditions (such as major depression, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, or panic disorder) that are marked primarily by sufficient disorganization of personality, mind, or emotions to impair normal psychological functioning and cause noticeable grief or disability and that are usually related with a disruption in standard judgement, feeling, mood, behavior, interpersonal interactions, or daily functioning. Mental health is described as a level of psychological comfort, or the absence of a mental illness. It is the "psychological state of someone who is functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustment from the perspective of positive psychology or holism, mental health may include an person 's capability to enjoy life, and produce stability connecting life activities and efforts to achieve psychological resilience. The World Health Organization, suggests mental health illness includes "subjective well-being, perceived self-efficacy, autonomy, competence, inter-generational dependence, and self-actualization of one 's intellectual and emotional potential, among others. The WHO further states that the well-being of an individual is encompassed in the recognition of their capabilities, managing with normal stresses of life, constructive work and involvement to their community. Ethnic differences, prejudiced evaluations, and competing professional

As nurses, it extremely important for us to have an understanding of mental health so we can decrease the stigma in the healthcare profession. There shouldn’t be a difference between a “psychiatric nurse” and a “general nurse”. Since over 50% of the population suffers from a mental illness, both professions should be equally educated and sensitive towards health care issues.

The ability to help bring a new person into the world seems like a very fulfilling career; however, helping those with mental illnesses seems to interesting, challenging, and fulfilling as well. The primary focus of a nurse should be the advancement of overall health. Patients deserve to be treated with respect. As a nurse, I

A long-contemplated concept in health and the wider community has been the hindering factors preventing good health outcomes for people with mental illness. One principal theory that has emerged is that stigma is preventing these good outcomes from being achieved. Three reoccurring links emerging in literature are that stigma impacts self-concept, stigma causes isolation and withdrawal, and that stigma reduces help-seeking and treatment adherence. These three themes will be explored individually from the primary perspective of a healthcare context to determine the effect of stigma on the health outcomes of people with mental illness. This topic of concern was selected as it has not received much attention by previous researchers. As such, little is still known and understood about the causal link between stigma and health outcomes.

I feel that in nursing school, we become robots when we perform our skills which makes us forget to actively listen to our patients. We are told that our skills will improve as we practice, but the one thing that we haven’t had considerable exposure to is mental illnesses. I enjoyed this article because I was able to relate to the nurses that felt incompetent in their care for a patient who is experiencing a mental break. The mind is such a powerful tool and if we can’t control what we think, feel or do, it makes us into someone that we’re not. This article gave a great deal of desolate and chilling statistics about how many people suffer with mental illness. It opened my eyes to how much exposure I will have with mental illness, possibly even on a daily basis. I’ve learned that we need to not only go through our daily routines of skills, we also need to constantly assess and be there for our patients in case they experience a mental breakdown. In the hospital, we tend to take care of people when they are at their lowest of lows. If we aren’t there to provide the support and comfort they need, not only will they not trust us, they won’t heal to their full

Mental illnesses are generally characterized by changes in mood, thought, or behavior. They can make daily activities difficult and impair a person’s ability to work, interact with family, and fulfill other major life functions (SAMHSA, 2015). Contemplated early on in history, treatments for mental illness looked to cure the reflections of the anger of gods, demonic possession, sorcery, the evil eye, or an angry deity, responded with equally mystical, and brutal treatments (Nash, 2007). Attempts to treat mental illness date back as early as 5000 BCE as verified by the discovery of trephined skulls in regions of ancient world cultures (Porter, 2002, p. 10). Only a few realized that individuals with mental illness should be treated humanely rather than exorcised, punished, or banished. Psychiatry has come a long way since the days patients were shunned from society and shackled in asylums. Experiments and techniques for treating mental illness from ancient times to the turn of the 20th century have paved the way for the treatment plans used today.

Mental illness; the term has increasingly become mainstream, as seen on the television, newspapers, and twitter. Shortly after the fatal shooting of a new screw in Virginia the word got around that the gunman had shown symptoms of a mental condition. A mental disorder is prolonged dysfunction in thoughts behavior and/or emotions that significantly deviates from common human behavior. During his life This individual was never diagnosed of this condition however after analysis of the terrible shooting and other events which led to the shooting showed major disturbance of his mind. With the recent advancement of psychology, the once underlying and difficult to interpret conditions have been exposed and step are being taken to overcome mental disorders. However, there is still debate of how mental disorders are viewed in the community and when thinking outside the norm turns into a mental condition. In the case of the Virginia shooter some analyst argued that the shooter was mentally well with wrong morals whereas some argued in favor of the existence of a mental condition. Taking a look at the major life events preceding the shooting, an insight into his mental health can be used to determine type of disorder he might have had. For instance, he had recently been fired from the same news agency for misconduct and many complains which had been filed against him. His Facebook and Twitter accounts showed that he felt out of control of his life, stress of losing a job and a lot of

It not easy to determine how many people suffer from mental illness. This is due to the changing definitions of mental illness and problems classifying, diagnosing, and reporting mental disorders. There are social stigmas attached to mental illness, such as being labeled "crazy," being treated as a danger to others, and being denied jobs or health insurance coverage. These negative connotations keep many sufferers from seeking help, and many of those in treatment do not reveal it on surveys. Some patients do not realize that their symptoms are caused by mental disorders. Even though more is being learned about how the brain works a lot of information has still yet to be discovered, thus mental health professionals must continually reevaluate how mental illnesses are defined and diagnosed. The Surgeon General 's report estimated that roughly 20% of the United States population was affected by mental disorders and that 15% use some type of mental health service every year. Community surveys estimate about 30% of the adult population in the United States suffer from mental disorders.

Mental health as Pilgrim (2005) stated is used positively to indicate a state of psychological wellbeing and negatively to indicate its opposite, or euphemistically to indicate facilities used by, or imposed upon, people with mental problems (pg 3) although Richards (2002) argued the concept of sanity and insanity are relative and may vary according to individual and social perspectives, and illustrated that an acceptable behaviour at an arts festival may not be perceived similar in a private home and that there are times when every one of us could be considered to be in an abnormal state of mind (pg 13-15) and in that regard dispensed the term ‘madness’ which could have emotive meaning, is neither a medical term nor a diagnosis and could

The following essay will begin by demonstrating what is understood by the concept of mental health. It will attempt to identify different explanations for the underlying issues causing mental illnesses and it will then centre around a case study focusing specifically on one mental health problem. A description of what the causes and effects of the chosen illness will be given and information on the available treatment will be presented. To round up the assignment a brief explanation of the chosen case study will be included with an attempt to distinguish the common issues identified and how they relate to the literature information provided throughout. In this assignment, the case study chosen will target depression.

World Health Organization (WHO, 2014) defines Mental health as a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully and is able to make a contribution to his or her community. Whereas Mental illnesses (MI) are characterized by alterations in thinking, mood or behavior associated with significant distress and impaired functioning (Health Canada, 2012). MI affects people of all ages, educational and income levels and cultures. Example of MI includes depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders and addictive behaviors. According to Center for addiction and Mental Health (CAMH, 2009) 2% of the total population in the world are affected by serious MI. Moreover, Public Health Agency Canada (PHAC, 2012) claims that 1 in 5 Canadians will experience a MI in their lifetime and remaining 4 will have a friend, family member or colleague who suffers from mental illness. It is a well-known and accepted statistic 20% of people with mental disorders have a co-occurring substance use problem (PHAC,2012).

The term mental illness is used to describe a disorder that causes a person to express themselves differently, this may be through their behaviour or thinking (WHO, 2016). According to the BBC website at least 1 in 4 people will be affected by a mental illness, and this could be triggered by an event or some trauma in their life (BBC, 2016). Mental health problems can trigger a mental illness, for most people the signs of mental health deterioration do not develop into a full mental illness, this is because some are people are better at coping or dealing with situations such as death (ASPA, 2013). Normality and abnormality are used to define the behaviour of a person, normality is defined as a person that shows no signs of a mental illness and is able to function, can deal with stressful situations, is capable of forming relationships and they find it easy to fit into society. Abnormality is the opposite and is defined as a person who is not classed as part of the norm, they often find it difficult to function and their behaviour may be viewed as unusual. As with the two case studies that I chose both suffered, they were either told or felt that as though they didn’t fit into society due to their disorder (Cardwell and Flanagan, 2005).

According to Mental Health America, 18% of Americans develop a mental illness of some sort that affects them in their daily lives. A mental illness’ definition is something that affects your mood, thinking, and behavior. Some mental illnesses include depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, eating disorders and addictive behaviors. Someone’s mental illness affects them in their everyday life, but how would it affect their learning ability? Someone’s state of mind greatly affects a how they learn and their success as a student in general. Certain mental illnesses can influence how someone functions throughout their daily lives. Certain disorders affect teens greatly throughout their education and lives: depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).