In the United States, the mental health crisis is a huge issue. In the 1950s and 1960s, the treatment facilities failed to provide proper care to these individuals resulting in a new reform idea called deinstitutionalization. It was a national shift in transitioning the mental health system from state hospitals to community-based facilities, but the new act created more issues and setbacks in reaching the needs of mentally ill people. As a result, many people dealing with mental health issues today wind up getting locked up 10 times more since jail or prison is the only place with proper treatment. In the article by Ford, it explains how our mental health system was in the 1950s, 1960s and the cruel methods used to treat mentally ill people. …show more content…
Kennedy in the article by Ford. Another reason for a new reform plan was due to media exposure through a movie called “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” which showed how the mental institute looked at the time. The movie showed these mentally ill people locked up with restrictive entry, just like jail. The facility restrained patients and used harsh “electroconvulsive” treatments. The new act was called deinstitutionalization, a process of closing the old state hospitals and creating new community-based facilities. Ford says, “a national network of community-based mental health centers, equipped to provide “a coordinated range of timely diagnostic, health, educational, training, rehabilitation, employment, welfare, and legal protection services.” The goal of President Kennedy’s reform plan was to eliminate the need for asylum and address the needs of these patients and to properly heal them. From 1955 to 1998, the population in these state hospitals decreased from 558,000 to less than 60,000. So, it was a success in freeing these people, but Ford points out, “States proved more enthusiastic about emptying the old facilities than about providing new ones. Many patients went from straitjackets to steam grates.” The states were more focused on getting rid of these people from state hospitals rather than enforcing newly stated reform plan by President Kennedy. Many mentally ill people find themselves homeless with no place to go, which results in a lot of them getting arrested just to get proper
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 this paper I will be comparing the visit to the State Mental Institution and the
The novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey showed the interpretations of Dr. Spivey and Nurse Ratched regarding the Therapeutic Community. Dr. Spivey a doctor at the hospital who is inferior to Nurse Ratched asserts himself with the patients. Nurse Ratched the head nurse sees the Therapeutic Community in a different light and seems to be against the patient's. The theory of the Therapeutic Community is that a man has to learn to get along in a group before he can get along in society.
The 1930s was a tough time for all of the mentally ill people. They were not treated the way that they do now. The mentally ill were called names like satans child, or they were not expected or very frowned upon in many religions. So because of all of the people who were mentally ill they started to create asylums. With these asylums they could hold almost all of the mentally ill people during that time. All of the asylums were overcrowded and sometimes there would be around 1 million patients. WIth all of the people in these asylums the staff and doctors became very understaffed so the patients living within the asylums were not treated how they should have been. Then doctors had found ways that they thought could cure these mentally ill people, whether it would be cruel to them or not. The treatments ran from major brain surgery to taking baths for multiple days.
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.
One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a movie that portrays a life story of a criminal named McMurphy who is sent to a mental institution because he believes that he himself is insane. While McMurphy is in the mental ward, he encounters other patients and changes their perception of the “real” world. Before McMurphy came to the mental ward, it was a place filled with strict rules and orders that patients had to follow; these rules were created by the head nurse, Nurse Ratched. However, once McMurphy was in the ward, everything, including the atmosphere, changed. He was the first patient to disobey Nurse Ratched. Unlike other patients who continuously obeyed Nurse Ratched, McMurphy and another patient named Charlie Cheswick decided to rebel
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.
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.
Pollack, Harold. "What Happened to U.S. Mental Health Care after Deinstitutionalization." Washingtonpost.com. N.p., 12 June 2013. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.
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.
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.
Two hundred years ago, Pennsylvania revolutionized the mental health care movement. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia doctor made a suggestion to his fellow colleagues about individuals suffering from mental disorders. Instead of treating individuals with mental disorders as a sign of demon possession or confused soul, treat their disorder as an illness. In the late 1800's, another Philadelphia doctor caught wind of Rush's idea to treat mental illness. Thomas Kirkbride believed the insane, as they were called in nineteeth century, deserved humane treatment. After this realization, the asylum movement took place in Pennsylvania. Individuals suffering from mental disorders were taken out of their inhumane circumstances an...
The idea of mental illnesses, diseases, and disorders may frighten some people, but there is more to the concept. Many rules and regulations have been changed or modified to care in mental institutions. The effects of removing mental patients from the care of specialists has been defined as deinstitutionalization. The concepts of deinstitutionalization include its definition, its effect on mental hospitals, its effect on community mental hospitals, and homeless populations.
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).