Mental health has been a recurring issue throughout history in the United States. For example approximately 1 in 5 adults, around 43.8 million people or 18.5% of the United States’ population experiences a mental illness in a given year. This issue has been prevalent ever since the mid-1950s which began the deinstitutionalization movement. The movement felt that the mentally ill were not taken care of properly and that the facilities were inadequate. Thus they released numerous mentally ill patients and they would later be incarcerated, and prison would become the new place for mental patients. In the United States mental health must be changed through extensive government means and personal understanding along with care. Plenty of issues …show more content…
The max benefit amount of $710 per month is given by the SSI but people need more. The government needs to update the amount so people can live a successful life and not have to worry about not having enough food. Once the SSI money is spent they have no other incomes usually which this in turn leads to them becoming homeless and when they are homeless they starve, freeze, die and more. The homeless people end up not getting the care they need and this leads them to causing problems for local law enforcement and this leads to the individuals being locked up which is what deinstitutionalization has created. The prisons must be changed by the government especially for the mentally ill. They are too strict which means they do not offer the capabilities that a mental hospital offers. They do not meet in groups to have therapy and talk about major emotional conflicts. If they do meet they are often locked in separate cells. The way they establish therapy is very sharp and scary and ineffective. The government needs to work on updating the therapy offered in prisons. Once the offender is released they are likely to recommit crimes and get locked up especially with a mental illness. Recidivism is what occurs for the people. Those who are released within three years, about two-thirds (67.8%) of released prisoners are rearrested. Plenty of these rearrested have mental disorders …show more content…
Personal understanding is necessary to deal with the United States mental health issue because the individuals do not understand what is wrong, some even see themselves as normal not abnormal. If people understood their disorders better they could effectively treat them with the aid of others. Unfortunately many mentally ill cannot grasp their disorders because to them they seen fine but really they are atypical. Those who need treatment may choose not to get any because they do not have support. People need to find support from others like their families. This will help the mental health issue because people won't feel alone and unloved. The goal is for people not write others off as ‘crazy’, but stigma can cause such slanderous titles. People must understand themselves to fully get treatment and this will lead to them continuing treatment such as psychopharmaceutical treatments like a person suffering from major depressive disorder would need to take a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (or SSRI) like Prozac to feel not depressed. Family support is integral for treatment of a mental disorder because a family member can notice when something is wrong and if it needs further inspection. Families need to care more for their members with mental illness and not just write them off or like in the way past drop them off and never see them
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
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.
Mental healthcare has a long and murky past in the United States. In the early 1900s, patients could live in institutions for many years. The treatments and conditions were, at times, inhumane. Legislation in the 1980s and 1990s created programs to protect this vulnerable population from abuse and discrimination. In the last 20 years, mental health advocacy groups and legislators have made gains in bringing attention to the disparity between physical and mental health programs. However, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses continues to be less than optimal. Mental health disparities continue to exist in all areas of the world.
Most of the idea of deinstitutionalized movement was because of the patient’s rights. Being out of the institutions gave the individuals more freedom, they didn’t always see the same four walls or the same people every day. In 2005 many severely mental ill individuals did not receive any psychiatric treatment. About half of the many that are severely mentally ill were homeless.
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.
Until the middle of the last century, public mental health in the United States had been the responsibility, for the most part, of individual states, who chose to deal with their most profoundly mentally-ill by housing them safely and with almost total asylum in large state mental hospitals. Free of the stresses we all face in our lives, the mentally-ill faced much better prospects for peaceful lives and even recovery than they would in their conditions in ordinary society. In the hospitals, doctors were always accessible for help, patients were assured food and care, and they could be monitored to insure they never became a danger to themselves or others. Our nation’s state hospital system was a stable, efficient way to help improve the lives of our mentally disabled.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and of that over sixty percent of jail inmates reported having a mental health issue and 316,000 of them are severely mentally ill (Raphael & Stoll, 2013). Correctional facilities in the United States have become the primary mental health institutions today (Adams & Ferrandino, 2008). This imprisonment of the mentally ill in the United States has increased the incarceration rate and has left those individuals medically untreated and emotionally unstable while in jail and after being released. Better housing facilities, medical treatment and psychiatric counseling can be helpful in alleviating their illness as well as upon their release. This paper will explore the increasing incarceration rate of the mentally ill in the jails and prisons of the United States, the lack of medical services available to the mentally ill, the roles of the police, the correctional officers and the community and the revolving door phenomenon (Soderstrom, 2007). It will also review some of the existing and present policies that have been ineffective and present new policies that can be effective with the proper resources and training. The main objective of this paper is to illustrate that the criminalization of the mentally ill has become a public health problem and that our policy should focus more on rehabilitation rather than punishment.
This essay examines why mental illness has not been given the priority in our system that it needs and it
In 2013, a news agency reported a California city sought reimbursement for services from Nevada for alleged patient dumping (CBS News). Patients without proper support systems struggle to survive by any means available and for some that means criminal activity. Government reports estimate that nearly two thirds of jail inmates have experienced a mental health issue within the previous year (National Institutes of Health). This raises several questions about the implications the closing of public psychiatric institutions and the perceptions associated with mental illness by the public. Specifically, if the public is at risk due to the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. To...
Since the mid 1900s, individuals with mental illness have been sent to jail rather than to receive proper treatment. These patients should be able to receive treatment and care because it will be increasing the safety of not only the person themselves but also others surrounding them.
According to a study done by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2005, roughly half of all jail and prison inmates in America suffer mental health problems. (James, et al. 2006) The prevalence of mental illness in the corrections system stems in part from the introduction of antipsychotic drugs in the 1960s. These medications helped treat the symptoms of mental illness and allowed many individuals suffering from mental illness to remain in the community. These medications were a great alternative for patients who would have otherwise been committed to mental institutions where they would not have been able to live normal, productive lives and would have received minimal treatment for their illnesses. Subsequent to this decrease of patients,
Since society has the potential to become one of the biggest obstacles known to man, mental patients are at a serious disadvantage. "For clients with serious mental illness, learning to live in a community setting poses challenges that are often difficult to overcome," (Kliewer et al. 40). Because of challenges like these, community mental hospitals must learn to adapt and discover innovative methods of psychological care for mental patients. Not only must they prioritize mental health care, they must also consider the community inhabitants. If not for the laws that allow sufficient homeland security, mental patients in such close proximity may not be such a worry. There are many factors to consider when it comes to releasing mental health patients into a community, but the releasing factors may soon change. Not only does deinstitutionalization affect the community facilities, it also affects the mental
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,
The development of mental health policy has gone through many changes in the course of the twentieth century. Today, mental health policy is totally different from the policy hundreds of years ago. Because of this, it is important to emphasize the fact that mental health policy has shifted from the indifference and isolation of people with mental illness, to the delivery of social services and community integration. In other words, mental health policy has experienced a serious change that has changed the attitude of policy makers, health care professionals, ordinary people, and also to people with a mental illness. Today, people with mental health problems are no longer outsiders as they used to be. Instead they are seen as people who have different needs and social geared towards their integration into the community. The federal government now has a policy that addresses the problems faced by people with mental illness, gives the community a chance to understand these people, and sets a standard in providing mental health services. There are over seventy actions in The Federal Mental Health Action Agenda. “It offers an unprecedented opportunity to fundamentally alter the form and function of the mental health service delivery system in this country to one that puts individuals-adults with mental illnesses, children with emotional disturbances, and family members-at its very core” (The Federal Action Agenda: First Steps. Web. 24 Mar. 2014).
Why is there a cloud of judgment and misunderstanding still surrounding the subject? People with a mental disorder or with a history of mental health issues are continually ostracized by society. This results in it being more difficult than it already is for the mentally ill to admit their symptoms to others and to seek treatment. To towards understanding mental illness is to finally lift the stigma, and to finally let sufferers feel safe and accepted within today’s society. There are many ways in which the mentally ill are degraded and shamed.