Concepts in mental Health Consensus and Controversies - Essay Example

 Introduction From its very beginning, the World Health Organization has always had an administrative segment particularly committed to mental health, as in response to requests from its Member States. Since its origination, the WHO has considered mental well-being to be a part of definition of health. The first Report of the Director General WHO mentions an administrative segment called “Mental Health” (WHO, 1951). The WHO magnificently specifies health as a condition of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not just the absence of disease or debility (WHO 2001, p.1). The mental and physical health cannot exist separately and alone. All the mental, physical, and social performances are interdependent. Moreover, health and sickness are not mutually exclusive and may exist together, but not when they are mutually exclusive only if health is delineated in a restrictive manner as the absence of illness (Sartorius 1990). Recognizing health as a state of balance including the self, other people, and the surroundings helps communities and individuals realize how to look for its melioration (WHO 2001, p.1). The origin of mental health concept started in 1908 from the psychotherapy movement which was originated by users of psychiatric services and professionals concerned with bettering the conditions and the quality of treatment of people bearing mental problems. Mental health is rather a political and ideological movement calling for various sections of society which is more than a scientific field of study. The movement was initiated with particular interest in the furtherance of the human rights of people with mental disturbances and the quality of their treatment and handling (Beers, 1937). This paper critically evaluates the origins and historical significance of the current concept of mental health. The main purpose of this paper is to highlight the consensus and controversies related to the concept of mental health with strong evidence of its relevancy with the physical health of a person. The mental status of people is affected by the nature, behavior, and health of people which significantly describes the importance of mental health concepts along with twin concept of mental illness. A good understanding of such concept is essentially relevant with mental health care. Origin and Historical Significance of Mental Health Concept The concept of mental health has a polymeric nature, and inaccurate and general borders, which gains from a historical view to be better understood. At present the broadly understood concept of mental health has its origins chased back to advances in public health in different branches of knowledge such as clinical psychopathology and psychological medicine. The origin of the mental hygiene movement can be assigned to the piece of work of Clifford Beers in the United States. A book namely A mind that found itself was published in 1908, which was based on the authors personal experience of admittances to three mental institutions and asylums. Through its origins and in reflecting Beers’ experience in mental hospitals, the mental hygiene movement was chiefly and essentially referred to the betterment of the care of people with mental folies. In the year 1909 when Beers wrote the book, a Mental Hygiene Society was instituted in Connecticut. Adolf Meyer suggested the term “mental hygiene” to Beers (Schneck, 1975). This had got tremendous and quick popularity to the initiation of the National Commission of Mental Hygiene. The Beers (1937) states: “When the National Committee was organized, in 1909, its chief concern was to humanize the care of the insane: to eradicate the abuses, brutalities and neglect from which the mentally sick have traditionally suffered.” The globalization of activities of this Commission led to the administration of some national associations related to mental hygiene in different countries from 1919 onwards. The International Committee on Mental Hygiene was produced from these national associations and afterwards replaced by the World Federation of Mental Health. The US National Committee for Mental Hygiene declared by 1937 that it looked for to accomplish its purposes which included furthering early diagnosis and treatment; formulating adequately sufficient hospitalization; inducing and conducting research; ensuring public apprehension and support of mental hygiene and psychiatric activities; apprising and instructing individuals and groups in the personal and practical application of mental hygiene precepts and teachings; and collaborating with political and private offices whose work affects at any point the area of mental hygiene (Beers, 1937). After approx fifty years of the mental health, and nearly a century of the mental hygiene movements, some developments and emergences can be comprehended. In the recent past, the WHO’s very conception of health has been oppugned, to a more ecumenical degree, which was developed half a century ago, it is no more found much appropriate by some analysts to the current situation (Saracci, and Frenk 1997). A recent course of action has been the accession of the modifier public to either mental state or to psychiatry which can also be found in a WHO document entitled Public mental health (WHO, 1996). And it is also mentioned in a journal named Psiquiatría Pública which was published since 1989, in Spain. This is majorly related to the concept of mental health to be a movement rather than a discipline. The WHO dedicated its annual report to mental health in 2001 named “The World Health Report - Mental health: new knowledge, new hope”. Mental Health Concept – A Detailed Analysis Considering the definition of mental health given by WHO, three key ideas are identified for the betterment of mental health that describe mental health as an integral part of health, a more than the absence of illness, and a closely associated with physical health and behavior. To attain its improvement defining mental health is significant, though not invariably essential. A variety of conflicts in values throughout cultures, nations, social classes and genders can come along to be too huge to take into account unanimity on a definition (WHO, 2001b). Nevertheless, each have many different aspects throughout the world and still have an essential common-sense global meaning simply like wealth or age, so mental health can be considered without limitation of interpreting it across cultures. The WHO has recently suggested that mental health is such a condition of well-being in which the person can recognize one’s own powers and cope with the conventional tensions of life. By using these capabilities the person can work effectively and productively, and is adequate to to make a contribution to the entire community (WHO 2001a). Mental health significantly suggests and entails physical and mental fitness rather than immunity and exemption from illness. According to George Vaillant in 2003 commented on this concept by saying that mental health is too crucial to be neglected and that it inevitably necessitates to be defined. Vaillant (2003) considered this to be such a composite undertaking as acquiring average mental health is not the same as being healthy because of the fact that averaging always involves blending in with the healthy the frequently prevalent amount of abnormal psychology and psychiatry. The concept of being healthy in certain cases depends on, civilization, geography, and the historic moment and consequences. Discussion on state or attributes also inevitably needs to be distinguished. For instance, an athlete temporarily out of action because of a broke ankle is considered to be healthy rather than a symptomless person with a history of bipolar emotional disturbance. There is also the twice as great risk of getting taint through contamination by values (Vaillant 2003, p. 1374). Mental health’s definition of a given culture can be insular and this should be considered whether the mental health is good for the self or the society, for being conformable or for creative thinking, for felicity or for survival of a person. However, Vaillant recommends that common sense should dominate and endure, and that specific elements have a worldwide grandness and worthiness to mental health. For instance, just like in spite of the difference in diet of every culture, the importance of vitamins and the other four fundamental food groups is ecumenical. Mental, behavioral, and social health issues may interact to deepen each other’s notions and impressions on demeanor and human welfare. On one hand, social problems such as drug abuse, ferocity, and maltreats of women and children, and on the other hand, health problems such as heart diseases, anxiety and depression, are more prevailing and extremely difficult to conform to in circumstances such as low income, high unemployment, restricted education, unhealthy lifestyle, human rights misdemeanors, nerve-racking work conditions, and gender discrimination (Desjarlais et al. 1995). Individual factors and experiences, mutual or reciprocal social action, societal structures and resources, and ethnical values collectively have an intense impact on mental health for each person. Mental health is also determined and affected by experiences in routine life, in families and schools, on streets, and at work (Lahtinen et al. 1999). Mental health and mental illness two concepts, that are influenced by multiple and interacting psychological, social, and biological factors, just like health and illness on the whole. The most percipient evidence refers to the chances of mental illnesses, which are related to indicators of poverty in the developed and developing world, along with small and low levels of education. The connection between poverty and mental disorders seems to be worldwide accepted which may occur in any society regardless of their stages of growth. Different elements such as insecurity and despair, rapid social change, and the chances of furiousness to occur and physical health problem may explicate and develop the greater susceptibility and exposure of poor people in any nation to mental illnesses (Patel & Kleinman 2003). The separate concepts of mental health and mental illness usually lead to confusion and false assumptions because of neglecting focus on both. So far, the inoffensive use of the term “mental health” to depict intervention, handling and support services for people with mental and psychological disorders and in other issues associated with mental ill-health is in practice which has been advocated by the persisting stigma smothering mental illness. This use of the term mental health conduces to disarray about the concept of mental health in addition to the concept of mental illness. The cure and dealing with mental illness was disoriented from the rest of health care and medicine in most regions of the world at least till lately. Practitioners consider many patients who are apparently incapable of being cured in the sequestered setting of mental institutions. The suppositional incurableness of melancholy, mental illness and insanity made practitioners consider the causes to be exclusively biologic. Subsequently the concept has persevered that prevention of mental disease is “all or none” (Cooper 1990). Moreover, that publicity and furtherance of mental health is in some way moved out to a greater extent from the troubles of the real world and could even switch resources from the handling, cure and rehabilitation of people struck by mental diseases. The parallel and duplicate purposes of meliorating mental health and letting down the personal and societal costs of mental unhealthiness can only be attained through with a public health access. Within a public health framework, the activities that can improve health include the promotion of health, the prevention of illness and disability, and the treatment and rehabilitation of those affected. These are different from one another, even though the actions and outcomes overlap. They are all required, are complementary, and one is no substitute for the other (Walker, Moodie & Herrman 2004). Psychological condition and health status is related to demeanor at all stages of life. A variety of evidence has been provided to indicate that the social elements consociated with mental health problems are also linked up with intoxicants and drug usage, dropout from educational institutions, and criminal offense. The presence of pernicious factors and the absence of the causal factors of health also seem to have a major function in other dangerous behaviors such as psychic and road trauma, insecure sexual behavior, and physical inactivity. Moreover, the fundamental and complex interaction among such determining factors and demeanors and mental health have been supported through evidence. For instance, an insufficient availability of significant employment may be related with depression and inebriant and drug usage. This may in sequence lead to road trauma, the consequences of which are physical handicap and loss of employment with deprivation (Walker, Moodie & Herrman 2004). In addition to that, the flocking of social and mental health problems in bankrupted communities in slum areas and shantytowns, and amid dangerous and fringy migratory populations may invariably refer to civil and domestic violence; self-annihilation; drug abuse, depression, and post psychologically painful disorder (Kleinman 1999, p. 979). Thus a research schedule and innovational policies and programs has been called for by Kleinman (1999) that can preclude the merely tremendous encumbrance that mental illness has on the wellness of societies ensuing from the multifariousness of varieties of social violence in this era. On the one hand, the inference is the need for the evolution and evaluation of programs that assures and cuts down such clumps, and on the other hand it aids people and families to contend in such considerations and conditions. Various mechanisms provide evidence for aspects through which the physical health and mental health are intimately related, in the same way as studies of connections between depression and heart and vascular disease are manifesting. The prominence and importance of mental health in the sustaining sound physical health and in retrieval from physical sickness is at present well supported. Mental health condition is considered to be a fundamental expression in altering the health status of a community. Several types of evidence intimate that mental health and its determining factors can be amended in affiliation with designed or may be unintentional changes in the physical and social environment. Discretion suggests that adequate explanation and consideration subsists for program and policy implementation attached to evaluation of process and effects in nations of high or low income. It also proposes the motivation to supervise the consequences on mental health of economic, social, and environmental alterations in any country. These actions in turn will proceed to elaborate the evidence ground to promote further careful treatments planned to meliorate or preserve mental health, to fit each singular time, locality, population, and country. Conclusion In general sense, mental health has established to be a crucial component of the definition of health and also continues to be used both to indicate a state as an attribute of health. It refers to denote to the crusade deduced from the mental hygiene movement, representing the practical application of psychiatry and psychological medicine not only on an individual basis, but also to groups such as societies and communities, as is the case with clinical psychiatry. Nevertheless, mental health is, rather unluckily, even so considered by many as a field of study, either as a equivalent of psychiatry and psychological medicine or any other complementary fields of psychiatry. Above discussed elements can be served as evidence of importance of mental health cognition as not only a field of study, rather a crucial factor of high relevance to mental health nurses. For psychiatric nurses, the knowledge of mental health and mental illness concepts is particularly important in a way that they are part of the diagnosing of mental disorders and treatment of mental health patients in outpatient community clinics or inpatient care hospitals. For such a reason, mental health nursing requires specified and specialized training isolated from other segments of care in the field of nursing. Instituting standard concepts of care in mental health nursing ameliorates intercommunication among faculty and the quality of intervention and handling of mental health patients. Dealing with mental health patients interests will better the overall wellness and performance of the patient. Thus, development of a rigorous plan for implementing care practices and supplying elaborated discharge directions will foreclose the risk of retrogress. References Beers CW, (1937). editor. A mind that found itself. New York: Doubleday, Draw & Co;. Cooper B (1990). Epidemiology and prevention in the mental health field. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 25 Desjarlais R et al. (1995). World mental health: problems and priorities in low income countries. New York, Oxford University Pres Frenk J, Sepulveda J, Gomez-Dantes O. The future of world health: the new world order and international health. BMJ. Kleinman A (1999). Social violence: research questions on local experiences and global responses. Archives of General Psychiatry, 56, pp. 978–979 Lahtinen E et al., eds (1999). Framework for promoting mental health in Europe. Hamina, (STAKES) National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health, Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Finland. Patel V, Kleinman A (2003). Poverty and common mental disorders in developing countries. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 81, pp. 609–615 Saracci R. (1997). The World Health Organization needs to reconsider its definition of health. BMJ. Sartorius N (1990). Preface. In: Goldberg D, Tantam D, eds. The public health impact of mental disorders. Toronto, Hogrefe and Huber Schneck JM. (1975). United States of America. In: Howells JG, editor. World history of psychiatry. New York: Brunner/Mazel;. pp. 432–475. Vaillant G (2003). Mental Health. 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