MENTAL HEALTH

Mental Health

Mental Health

Psychiatric Disability

Mental health is defined as the psychological state that exists in the absence of mental illness. Contemporary social scientific thought, however, has abandoned the view that mental health and mental illness are antithetical to one another. Now, lack of mental illness no longer simply implies the presence of mental health, just as lack of mental health no longer suggests the presence of mental illness. Thus, the term mental health refers to a social psychological state greater than the mere absence of mental illness. Moreover, some scholars suggest that mental health can be present in individuals diagnosed with mental illness, a position that lends greater support to the view that mental health and mental illness ought not to be treated as oppositional categories.

Social scientists believe that mental health exists on a continuum, with optimal mental health occupying one pole of the continuum, poor mental health occupying the other. According to this model, an individual's location on the continuum is subject to change over time and is influenced by some combination of social, psychological, and biological factors. In advocating this model, many practitioners of social work, sociology, and psychology reject definitions of mental health that posit it as a discrete state of being. The continuous model of mental health, however, is at times inconsistent with the definitions articulated within the medical community. (Wheaton, 1999)

Counseling and Therapy of Psychological Illness

The determination of the clinical significance of a therapy outcome is invariably related to the perspective of the outcome evaluator. Early efforts at examining therapy outcomes generally relied exclusively on therapists' impressionistic ratings of client improvement. Over time, outcome evaluation moved from the reporting of therapists' clinical impressions to the use of standardized therapist rating scales to measure general improvement. (Veroff, Joseph, Elizabeth, and Richard 1981)

The fundamental question in terms of therapy outcome is whether clients receiving therapy are, at the conclusion of their experience, better off than those who need therapy but do not receive it. In other words, “Does counseling/psychotherapy work?” This is a question about the absolute efficacy of therapy. As suggested earlier, it is generally assumed that therapy is an effective treatment for mental health concerns; however, it is an assumption that has been and continues to be open to the scrutiny of researchers. (Breslau et al, 2005)

One of the interesting, but perplexing, aspects of counseling and psychotherapy is the great diversity of different schools and orientations that exist in the field. In the mid-1960s, one list documented over 60 different approaches to therapy. In 1975, a report of the Research Task Force of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) noted over 130 different types of psychotherapy. (Umberson, Debra and Kristi, 1999)

Dual Diagnosis Issue

The term double trouble refers to a condition that includes dual or multiple diagnoses when one or more diagnoses is for a substance use disorder and one or more diagnoses is for a mental disorder. The term co-occurring disorder is used predominantly to describe this condition to further clarify the fact that a ...