Worlds of the Mentally Ill

Worlds of the Mentally Ill PDF Author: Dan A. Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Lewis offers a radically different perspective on care of the mentally ill now that these patients are no longer isolated from society. This book is based on a series of interviews conducted with 313 Chicago area patients released from four different state hospitals. Rather than rely on retrospective data-gathering on patients at intake, Lewis began at the time of release, tracking the patients for 12 months during which they were interviewed twice. This approach permitted Lewis and his researchers to discover where the patients went, whom they turned to for help, how they viewed themselves and their illness, and how they fared. Former patients who had lost their homes and support networks by alienating families and employers ended up on the streets and eventually in jail. Half of the patients interviewed had criminal records, a third of them having committed felonies. Of the former patients who returned to mental institutions, 97 percent did so voluntarily. One-fifth of those recommitted themselves because they lacked jobs and housing. Lewis says the government can help by providing more welfare funding, medication aid, support to patients’ families, and homeless shelters with qualified counselors. "If we don’t do anything about the poverty, we can’t do anything about the mental illness. We must tie work and welfare to treatment settings."

Worlds of the Mentally Ill

Worlds of the Mentally Ill PDF Author: Dan A. Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Lewis offers a radically different perspective on care of the mentally ill now that these patients are no longer isolated from society. This book is based on a series of interviews conducted with 313 Chicago area patients released from four different state hospitals. Rather than rely on retrospective data-gathering on patients at intake, Lewis began at the time of release, tracking the patients for 12 months during which they were interviewed twice. This approach permitted Lewis and his researchers to discover where the patients went, whom they turned to for help, how they viewed themselves and their illness, and how they fared. Former patients who had lost their homes and support networks by alienating families and employers ended up on the streets and eventually in jail. Half of the patients interviewed had criminal records, a third of them having committed felonies. Of the former patients who returned to mental institutions, 97 percent did so voluntarily. One-fifth of those recommitted themselves because they lacked jobs and housing. Lewis says the government can help by providing more welfare funding, medication aid, support to patients’ families, and homeless shelters with qualified counselors. "If we don’t do anything about the poverty, we can’t do anything about the mental illness. We must tie work and welfare to treatment settings."

Worlds of the Mentally Ill

Worlds of the Mentally Ill PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mentally ill
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Mental Health in a Mad World

Mental Health in a Mad World PDF Author: James Aloysius Magner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Crazy Like Us

Crazy Like Us PDF Author: Ethan Watters
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9781416587194
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves. For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties. Crazy Like Us documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases. In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar campaign by one of the world's biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the drug. But this book is not just about the damage we've caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in other cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we begin to understand how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world's therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from other cultures' beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.

The Inner World of Mental Illness

The Inner World of Mental Illness PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Decolonizing Global Mental Health

Decolonizing Global Mental Health PDF Author: China Mills
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135080437
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Decolonizing Global Mental Health is a book that maps a strange irony. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Movement for Global Mental Health are calling to ‘scale up’ access to psychological and psychiatric treatments globally, particularly within the global South. Simultaneously, in the global North, psychiatry and its often chemical treatments are coming under increased criticism (from both those who take the medication and those in the position to prescribe it). The book argues that it is imperative to explore what counts as evidence within Global Mental Health, and seeks to de-familiarize current ‘Western’ conceptions of psychology and psychiatry using postcolonial theory. It leads us to wonder whether we should call for equality in global access to psychiatry, whether everyone should have the right to a psychotropic citizenship and whether mental health can, or should, be global. As such, it is ideal reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers in the fields of critical psychology and psychiatry, social and health psychology, cultural studies, public health and social work.

Show Me All Your Scars

Show Me All Your Scars PDF Author: Lee Gutkind
Publisher: Underland Press
ISBN: 1937163261
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Every year, one in four American adults suffers from a diagnosable mental health disorder. In these true stories, writers and their loved ones struggle as their worlds are upended. What do you do when your father kills himself, or your mother is committed to a psych ward, or your daughter starts hearing voices telling her to harm herself—or when you yourself hear such voices? Addressing bipolar disorder, OCD, trichillomania, self-harm, PTSD, and other diagnoses, these stories vividly depict the difficulties and sorrows—and sometimes, too, the unexpected and surprising rewards—of living with mental illness.

The Lobotomist

The Lobotomist PDF Author: Jack El-Hai
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470098309
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, M.D., who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman’s documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius. The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, M.D., who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Although many patients did not benefit from the thousands of lobotomies Freeman performed, others believed their lobotomies changed them for the better. Drawing on a rich collection of documents Freeman left behind and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look into the life of this complex scientific genius and traces the physician's fascinating life and work.

A First-Rate Madness

A First-Rate Madness PDF Author: Nassir Ghaemi
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143121332
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
The New York Times bestseller “A glistening psychological history, faceted largely by the biographies of eight famous leaders . . .” —The Boston Globe “A provocative thesis . . . Ghaemi’s book deserves high marks for original thinking.” —The Washington Post “Provocative, fascinating.” —Salon.com Historians have long puzzled over the apparent mental instability of great and terrible leaders alike: Napoleon, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, and others. In A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center, offers a myth-shattering exploration of the powerful connections between mental illness and leadership and sets forth a controversial, compelling thesis: The very qualities that mark those with mood disorders also make for the best leaders in times of crisis. From the importance of Lincoln's "depressive realism" to the lackluster leadership of exceedingly sane men as Neville Chamberlain, A First-Rate Madness overturns many of our most cherished perceptions about greatness and the mind.

The Wisdom of Mental Illness

The Wisdom of Mental Illness PDF Author: Jez Hughes
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1786786001
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This book explores how the ancient path of shamanism can help us to understand the nature of mental illness, recasting psychological breakdown as a potentially transformational experience. What we label as pathological could actually be an initiation into a better relationship with ourselves and the world. Written for those who are experiencing or who have experienced mental illness, or whose loved ones are going through such episodes, or who are mental wellbeing practitioners, this is a guide to the potentially transformational experience of that which we label mental illness. It explores the ancient concept of the "shamanic sickness", whereby the prospective shaman underwent many years of mental distress as part of their initiation, and looks at what this can teach us about mental health. It argues that, in some cases, what we seek to medicate could actually be a calling to a path of service and healing. The book also explores our cultural biases around mental illness. What we define as pathological, many cultures see as a sign of being inspired and in touch with greater powers. It looks at our uneasy relationship with altered states of consciousness and how these might hold the key to healing many symptoms of mental illness. Finally it looks at how we, as species, have come out of balance in our relationship to nature and the devastating affect this is having on our mental health. By learning from ancient indigenous cultures who have remained in balance with the natural world, this book looks at solutions to heal this modern imbalance and find a way forward for the Earth and ourselves.