Mental Ill Health

Americans are now spending billions of dollars on psychiatric medications but according to Frances “We are ignoring the people who have severe psychiatric illness; so that, one-third of people with severe depression see a mental health clinician, two-thirds don’t. Two-thirds of people with severe depression get no treatment at all. At the same time, we’re way over-diagnosing people who have milder problems that would get better on their own.” Diagnosis can cause more harm than good when not really needed. We are over-treating those who don’t need treatment, while neglecting those who do.

In the video, “The New Asylums”, it demonstrated how deinstitutionalization has left thousands of mentally ill patients in the hands of the prison system. As the mental health hospitals closed down, the police department and prison system has become responsible for the mentally ill people that are on the streets. There was a firm point made about the release of mentally ill patients- “When hundreds of thousands of mentally ill are released, they do not magically become healthy. They went to the streets, became homeless, and turned to a system that cannot say no.” The video also stated that today, there are nearly 500,000 mentally ill people being held in jails and prisons throughout the country. Furthermore, there was no safety net for those

Throughout the centuries mental illness has been treated by countless treatments. Modern treatments have created an argument over which treatment options are best. the most debates treatments today are medication and therapy. the argument of medication versus therapy as treatments for mental illness is fairly new. Yet, proponents of both sides have strong arguments stating the advantages of their treatment option. proponents of medication believe pharmacogenetics, tailored treatments, and medication's ability to treat severe disorders makes medication the better treatment option. proponents of therapy believe drug addiction, suicide prevention, and need adaption establishes therapy as the better treatment choice.

In certain organization in the state level such as: keep qualified candidate that promoted the well-being state and the citizens in arena such as correctional and police officer, hospital staff and other trained individual. Without trained individual, the citizens with mental health are the one that will be hurt. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that 130 patients at state-run hospitals had died under questionable circumstances over the course of seven years. That is when the feds stepped in. U.S. Department of Justice looked into the conditions of Georgia’s mental hospitals. What federal investigators found was that patients in Georgia facilities were dying or committing suicide at alarming rates. What is worse, the feds said, is that those incidents of neglect and abuse could have been prevented.

Around the 1970’s and 1980’s around the United States many mental hospitals were shut down. There were many reasons why they closed these Asylums was because money, and knowing that there was only about twenty county asylums were built around the country. The asylums also known as the Looney bin was established in Britain after passing in 1808 county asylum act. There were so many patients in these asylums around the world in 1955 about 558,239 severely mentally ill people in the United States were accounted for. Now in these times any mentally ill people don’t get help they just go straight to jail without proper diagnosis or treatment. People need to know these people need extreme care and treatment. Even regular people or considered the norm in today’s society eventually go crazy when they’re in prison too long. We have as much people that are mentally ill as regularly incarcerated. There is one prison in Houston Texas that does take care there mentally ill. We have about 2.2 million

Today, it seems almost incomprehensible that so many people with serious mental illnesses reside in prisons instead of receiving treatment. Over a century and a half ago, reform advocates like Dorothea Dix campaigned for prison reform, urging lawmakers to house the mentally ill in hospitals rather than in prisons. The efforts undertaken by Dix and other like-minded reformers were successful: from around 1870 to 1970, most of the United States’ mentally ill population was housed in hospitals rather than in prisons. Considering reformers made great strides in improving this situation over a century and a half ago. Granted, mental hospitals in the late 19th and early 20th century were often badly run and critically flawed, but rather than pushing for reform of these hospitals, many politicians lobbied for them to close their doors, switching instead to a community-based system for treating the mentally ill. Although deinstitutionalization was originally understood as a humane way to offer more suitable services to the mentally ill in community-based settings, some politicians seized upon it as a way to save money by shutting down institutions without providing any meaningful treatment alternatives. This callousness has created a one-way road to prison for massive numbers of impaired individuals and the inhumane warehousing of thousands of mentally ill people. Nevertheless, there are things that can be done to lower the rate mentally ill persons are being incarcerated. Such

Prisons are home to 33,000 mentally ill patients in California, alone. Filling 30 percent of California’s overall prison population, the prisons are becoming unconstitutionally crowded (Source C). In a Federal District Court ruling in Sacramento, “Judge Lawrence Karlton noted that the treatment of the seriously mentally ill continues to violate prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment” (Source C). Poor staffing is not fully to blame for inadequate care, insufficient treatment space, and suicide rates. When President Kennedy began the community mental health centers movement, he deprived the mentally ill of shelter which forced patients to live in the streets (Source A).

The conditions of psychiatric hospitals were poorly maintained yet again. From the late 1800s until the mid-1900s, the conditions of these institutions were hit or miss. Despite the rising population of those in need of mental health treatment, conditions were deteriorating across the board. This pushed in the deinstitutionalization movement (Nevid, Rathus, & Green, 2014). This was a push to remove patients from state-run hospitals into a more community-based treatment center. In most cases today, there are treatment plans in place depending upon the severity of the disorder an individual may be suffering from. It’s more about treating an individual with any variety of modern techniques or therapies and trying to reintegrate them into society rather than a lifelong stay in an institution. Deinstitutionalization didn’t work the way it was intended. After it was put into place there was a rise in the homeless population and different programs that were supposed to be put into place didn’t live up to

Proof written by David Auburn goes through the life of an esteemed mathematician plagued by mental illness. In the beginning of the play Proof we are introduced to a professor at a local Chicago College named Robert. We first are introduced to Robert through a delusion of Catherine’s, another main protagonist of David auburns play. Auburn shows Robert’s genius and madness at various stages throughout the play. Auburn goes on throughout his play to exemplify the impact mental illness has on everyday family life.

What is left is that we have many citizens who are mentally ill and are not receiving treatment. However the patients who are able to receive treatment are only able to have some treatment covered. Health insurers are responsible for covering the immensely large cost of substantial treatment, a mixture of medication and therapy; since therapy is highly priced, less reliable, and time consuming; patients typically do not receive treatment for therapy. Health insurers would much rather cover medication because it is cheaper, it heals patients faster, and it is more reliable than therapy. However, medication is not made to heal, but to only coax symptoms of a mental illness (Sandberg).

In today’s society, mental hospitals are still a potential solution for the mentally ill, but they are seeing a steady decline in incoming patients. Although there is still a need for the mentally ill to be admitted to mental institutions such as hospitals, the reality is that the heightened cost of treatment deters many potential patients. Instead, the mentally

There are many different mental illnesses and ailments and just as many medications to treat them. The problem is that sometimes the medications are not correct for your disorders due to similar symptoms. This leads to problems with the patients who need help, but the patients are not getting the right medications and treatment they need.

In today’s society there is a greater awareness of mental illnesses. With this greater awareness one might assume that there would be a substantial increase in government involvement or funding in the area of mental illness treatment. Unfortunately this isn’t the case in the U.S. today. There are hundreds of thousands of people with mental illness that go untreated. These potential patients go untreated for many reasons. These reasons are discussed in the Time article “Mental Health Reform: What Would it Really Take.

A person who has a chemical mental illness is likely regulated and being treated by a physician or medical professional. However, There is still a stigma to the mental health need so many people do not seek treatment but instead self medicate. Drug addiction and overdose is a sign of mental illness. If mental health that was not only quality but easily accessible to any person in need, it would eliminate a portion of the need for crisis intervention.

Psychological disorders are stated to be abnormalities of the mind, known as mental disorders (Klasco, 2011). Abnormalities of the mind cause persistent behaviors that affect an individual’s daily function and life (Klasco, 2011). The different types of psychological disorders include mood disorders, personality disorders, anxiety disorders, and eating disorders (Klasco, 2011). The causes of these disorders are unknown, but factors that contribute to these disorders include childhood experiences, chemical imbalances in the brain, illnesses, heredity, stress, and prenatal exposures (Klasco, 2011). Psychological disorders can be serious and can be life-threatening