The Current and Past Mental Health Policies of this Nation James Lapinel 6/12/13 Before the 1970’s, asylums for persons designated to be psychotic or otherwise severely mentally ill, called “institutions” were quite common. Most of such asylums were built to mimic Victorian mansions and contain hundreds of patients. It and many structures like it have come to be symbols of oppression, largely due to the literary work of Ken Kesey and the abuse scandals at the turn of the last century. I live near one of such former institutions. It was the Hudson River Hospital, and it represents my personal experience with the current mental health policies of this nation. Institutions throughout the country have been shut down for many reasons. It was suspected, and then confirmed that some facilities abused their patients. The containment of the psychotic was questionable. Most of the people that the institutions were holding hadn’t committed any crimes, and the asylums seemed like prisons to many. Deinstitutionalization is the process of removing institutions from the mental health care system. According to pbs.org, deinstitutionalization legally commenced in the U.S. in 1955, when chlorpromazine became widely available. Chlorpromazine was the most effective antipsychotic that had ever existed at the time. Its development caused legal actions based on the idea that psychosis could and should, be treated in the most non-restrictive environment possible. Deinstitutionalization reached its height in the 1970’s. This idea is flawed because anti-psychotics aren’t a guaranteed “cure” for all psychotic patients. Psychosis is often difficult to define and diagnose, and much harder to treat. Not ... ... middle of paper ... ...functional mental health care system. Those affected directly by grave physical afflictions often vow not to let their illness define them. Such is a brave sentiment, but why can’t the mentally ill say the same for themselves? Have they no choice? Are the psychotic persons of today’s world destined to suffer on the streets and prisons of this country? I have no credentials in any of the areas I’ve discussed, I don’t know what can be done for them, but it is clear to me that not enough is being done. Surely this world had a better quality of life to offer Mr. Sprankle, can we not provide it? Deinstitutionalization has worsened the condition of the psychotics in America, and nothing is being done to correct that. A return to the pre-1955 institutions would not only be nearly impossible, it would be hurtful. A new system must be conceived and implemented at all costs.
Pollack, Harold. "What Happened to U.S. Mental Health Care after Deinstitutionalization." Washingtonpost.com. N.p., 12 June 2013. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.
As a result of the lack of regulation in state mental institutions, most patients were not just abused and harassed, but also did not experience the treatment they came to these places for. While the maltreatment of patients did end with the downsizing and closing of these institutions in the 1970’s, the mental health care system in America merely shifted from patients being locked up in mental institutions to patients being locked up in actual prisons. The funds that were supposed to be saved from closing these mental institutions was never really pumped back into treating the mentally ill community. As a result, many mentally ill people were rushed out of mental institutions and exposed back into the real world with no help where they ended up either homeless, dead, or in trouble with the law. Judges even today are still forced to sentence those in the latter category to prison since there are few better options for mentally ill individuals to receive the treatment they need. The fact that America, even today, has not found a proper answer to treat the mentally ill really speaks about the flaws in our
In the book “The Mad Among Us-A History of the Care of American’s Mentally Ill,” the author Gerald Grob, tells a very detailed accounting of how our mental health system in the United States has struggled to understand and treat the mentally ill population. It covers the many different approaches that leaders in the field of mental health at the time used but reading it was like trying to read a food label. It is regurgitated in a manner that while all of the facts are there, it lacks any sense humanity. While this may be more of a comment on the author or the style of the author, it also is telling of the method in which much of the policy and practice has come to be. It is hard to put together without some sense of a story to support the action.
The fight for improved health care for those with mental illness has been an ongoing and important struggle for advocates in the United States who are aware of the difficulties faced by the mentally ill and those who take care of them. People unfortunate enough to be inflicted with the burden of having a severe mental illness experience dramatic changes in their behavior and go through psychotic episodes severe enough to the point where they are a burden to not only themselves but also to people in their society. Mental institutions are equipped to provide specialized treatment and rehabilitative services to severely mentally ill patients, with the help of these institutions the mentally ill are able to get the care needed for them to control their illness and be rehabilitated to the point where they can become a functional part of our society. Deinstitutionalization has led to the closing down and reduction of mental institutions, which means the thousands of patients who relied on these mental institutions have now been thrown out into society on their own without any support system to help them treat their mental illness. Years after the beginning of deinstitutionalization and after observing the numerous effects of deinstitutionalization it has become very obvious as to why our nation needs to be re-institutionalized.
In the 1840’s, the United States started to build public insane asylums instead of placing the insane in almshouses or jail. Before this, asylums were maintained mostly by religious factions whose main goal was to purify the patient (Hartford 1). By the 1870’s, the conditions of these public insane asylums were very unhealthy due to a lack of funding. The actions of Elizabeth J. Cochrane (pen name Nellie Bly), during her book “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” significantly heightened the conditions of these mental asylums during the late 1800s.
As science has evolved, so have treatments for mental illnesses have over time. The medical model is described as the view that psychological disorders are medical diseases with a biological origin (King, 2010, pg. 413). Abnormal behavior that categorizes some disorders can be impacted by biological factors such as genes, psychological factors such as childhood experiences, and even sociocultural factors such as gender and race (King, 2010). Treatments such as psychosurgery (lobotomy) , drug therapy (pharmaceuticals), electroconclusive therapy, and psychoanalysis are used to treat a wide range of psychological disorders. Back then, the public’s negative views on mental illnesses also went as far to associate with the people who treated it; psychiatrists. “Nunnally (1961) found that the public evaluated professionals who treated mental disorders significantly more negatively than those who treat physical disorders,” (Phelan, Link, Stueve, & Pescosolido, 2000, pg. 189). People back then didn’t see the point in “paying to be told that they were crazy”. However, in today’s society, it is now acceptable to seek help from psychiatric professionals; we are seeing more and more people seek mental health treatment. “In terms of facility-based records of utilization (Manderscheid and Henderson 1998), the data suggest that the rate of utilization of professional mental health services has at least doubled and maybe tripled, between the 1950’s and today,” (Phelan, Link, Stueve, & Pescosolido, 2000, pg. 189). In the 1950’s, neuroleptic drugs like Thorazine were introduced to treat the symptoms of schizophrenia. These drugs block a neurotransmitter called dopamine from getting to the brain, which in turn reduce schizophrenic symptoms, however there are some side effects such as substantial twitching of the neck, arms, and legs, and even dysphoria or lack of pleasure. (King, 2010, pg.
Mental illness has been around as long as people have been. However, the movement really started in the 19th century during industrialization. The Western countries saw an immense increase in the number and size of insane asylums, during what was known as “the great confinement” or the “asylum era” (Torrey, Stieber, Ezekiel, Wolfe, Sharfstein, Noble, Flynn Criminalizing the Seriously Mentally Ill). Laws were starting to be made to pressure authorities to face the people who were deemed insane by family members and hospital administrators. Because of the overpopulation in the institutions, treatment became more impersonal and had a complex mix of mental and social-economic problems. During this time the term “psychiatry” was identified as the medical specialty for the people who had the job as asylum superintendents. These superintendents assumed managerial roles in asylums for people who were considered “alienated” from society; people with less serious conditions wer...
“During the 1970’s and 1980’s mental hospitals had a fiscal crisis and thousands of people with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses who had been institutionalized for years had been released by the courts. These individuals no longer met the standard for forcible incarceration because they were not dangerous or in need of supervisory treatment any longer. As a result a large amount of people with mental illnesses or were socially fragile were let go from hospitals lacking psychiatric and social work follow up, and many stopped taking their medications” (Shapiro & Wizner, 2011, p.2-3). In 2002, New York City along with New York’s mental health and parole supervision agencies based a nonprofit organization called Project Renewal. This program assisted ex-offenders that had ment...
There are so many types of mental illnesses that affect people every day. When some people think of mental illnesses they think of the ones that would cause people to have physical symptoms as well, but that’s untrue, there are many more that you would never know anyone has if you were to see them on the street. As defined by the 2008 encyclopedia “a mental illness is any disease of the mind or brain that seriously affects a person’s ability or behavior. Symptoms of a mental illness may include extreme moods, such as excessive sadness or anxiety, or a decreased ability to think clearly or remember well.” A mentally ill person has severe symptoms that damage the person’s ability to function in everyday activities and situations. Every nation and every economic level can be affected by a mental illness. In the United States alone about 3% of the population has severe mental illness and to add to that number about 40% of people will experience a type of mental illness at least once in their lives. Some cases of mental illnesses can go away on their own, but some cases are so severe that they require professional treatment. There is so much more available to help people recover from their symptoms than in the past.
The BBC documentary, Mental: A History of the Madhouse, delves into Britain’s mental asylums and explores not only the life of the patients in these asylums, but also explains some of the treatments used on such patients (from the early 1950s to the late 1990s). The attitudes held against mental illness and those afflicted by it during the time were those of good intentions, although the vast majority of treatments and aid being carried out against the patients were anything but “good”. In 1948, mental health began to be included in the NHS (National Health Service) as an actual medical condition, this helped to bring mental disabilities under the umbrella of equality with all other medical conditions; however, asylums not only housed people
Those with mental illness would live in the community with an array of services and be able to be free from the constraints of confinement. In the early 1960’s the United States began an initiative to reduce and close publicly-operated mental hospitals. This became known as deinstitutionalization. The goal of deinstitutionalization was to allow people suffering from mental illness to live more independently in the community with treatments provided through community health programs. Unfortunately, the federal government did not provide sufficient ongoing funding for the programs to meet the growing demand. States reduced their budgets for mental hospitals but failed to increase funding for on-going community-based mental health programs. As a result of deinstitutionalization hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people were released into the community without the proper resources they needed for their treatment. (Harcourt,
For many decades the mentally ill or insane have been hated, shunned, and discriminated against by the world. They have been thrown into cruel facilities, said to help cure their mental illnesses, where they were tortured, treated unfairly, and given belittling names such as retards, insane, demons, and psychos. However, reformers such as Dorothea Dix thought differently of these people and sought to help them instead. She saw the inhumanity in these facilities known as insane asylums or mental institutions, and showed the world the evil that wandered inside these asylums. Although movements have been made to improve conditions in insane asylums, and were said to help and treat the mentally ill, these brutally abusive places were full of disease and disorder, and were more like concentration camps similar to those in Europe during WWII than hospitals.
Continuing budget cuts on mental health care create negative and detrimental impacts on society due to increased improper care for mentally ill, public violence, and overcrowding in jails and emergency rooms. Origins, of mental health as people know it today, began in 1908. The movement initiated was known as “mental hygiene”, which was defined as referring to all things preserving mental health, including maintaining harmonious relation with others, and to participate in constructive changes in one’s social and physical environment (Bertolote 1). As a result of the current spending cuts approaching mental health care, proper treatment has declined drastically. The expanse of improper care to mentally ill peoples has elevated harmful threats of heightened public violence to society.
In 1950s the construction of new psychiatric centres took place in order to treat people with mental disorders. Local authorities provided financial resources to sustain these establishments of psychiatry. Apparently those psychiatric centres were treating the patients in unappropriated ways and inhuman acts as well as demanding them to remain inside the psychiatric centres for the rest of
Mental health refers to the state of individuals psychologically, emotionally and socially. Mental health affects a person’s emotions, feelings, thoughts, and sections when exposed to different situations. Furthermore, mental health is responsible for a person’s reaction to stress and other social conditions. Generally, mental health affects how a person relates to others and their ability to understand and interact with them. Therefore, problems that affect a person’s mental health affect the abilities to socialize, their feelings, moods, reaction to situations. The person experiencing mental health problem may portray different behaviors when confronted with different issues. Mental health issues have several