Psychiatric treatments

During the nineteenth century there was a movement to reform institutions in the United States to state mental hospitals. An important individual in the reforming of America's mental institutions was a Massachusetts schoolteacher named Dorothea Lynde Dix. In her investigations of the privately funded institutions for the mentally ill that were only available for the wealthy, she discovered horrendous living conditions. Therefore she advocated for publicly funded state hospitals (Millon et al.,…

Ken Kesey, in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, emphasizes the abuse of psychiatry in the story and everyday life by contrasting society’s liberating interpretation of normal to Big Nurse’s captivating consideration of normal. In today’s society, the idea of a “normal person” forms when the population takes into consideration various characteristics that seem to be present in each individual while organizing the traits to form an identity that “must” apply to everyone around them.…

The Origins of Stigma about Mental Health The word stigma emanates from the Greek language meaning a mark that is left in the body during the cultural branding of animals in the Greek culture. The name would gain popularity in later years only this time referring to the unwarranted social disapproval of a due to perceived or existing individual characteristics. In most instances, the stigma is based on backward and stereotypic beliefs that have a very shallow premise (Stuart, 2008). The…

themselves due to the long exposure to that environment. That environment can’t be good for anyone’s state of mind. It saddens me to think that a majority of the patients in those hospitals were being misdiagnosed and weren’t being given the proper treatment to help them…

The American 1950s. A time of change and revolt. Psychiatric methods were far different and more archaic than today’s treatment measures. Solutions were often violent or manipulative, sometimes led by medication and drugs. Ken Kesey, an American author in the’50s, was, around this same time, paid to test the drug LSD in a government-sponsored experiment. Concurrently, Kesey worked the night shift on a mental ward in Oregon. While working on the ward, Kesey began to speculate that the patients…

Chapter Three Throughout the chapter, "On Being Sane in Insane Places: EXPERIMENTING WITH PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS," Lauren Slater introduces David Rosenhan 's experiment and his emphasis on improper diagnosis. This chapter reviews Rosenhan 's original experiment and a duplicate, but the results slightly differ. The conflicts faced in these experiments are mislabeling with improper diagnosis and unfair treatment, while being admitted into a state hospital. Slater does an outstanding job explaining…

people who suffer from mental illnesses exhibit seemingly abnormal behaviors that are different from societal norms. As a result, close relatives or authorities often send people suffering from mental conditions to mental hospitals, asylums, or psychiatric wards to heal. However, in the past, some of these patients suffered abuse under the hands of the authorities…

the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act in 1963, which allowed the National Institute of Mental Health to create community-based mental health facilities, helped provide a course of prevention, early treatment, and ongoing care to mental health patients. It gave patients the option to be closer to their families and integrate into society. By 1977, only 650 of these community centers had been opened, serving some 1.9 million mentally ill Americans,…

Wrong Thoughts: The Tragedy of Mental Illness The mind bears many titles. It is the brain, the thought provoker, the roadmap, and exclusively the source of all wit and intellect. Just as the famous saying goes: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Having agency and personality are some of the most distinguishing attributes that characterizes a human being. Despite this fact, the maxim aforementioned as well identifies a well-rooted calamity that is not only plaguing the U.S. but the entire…

said “this is what I want to do”, and on the sixth semester a famous psychiatric started teaching us cognitive impairments and I got attached to him as a volunteer for projects and researchers in a recognized public university. I also did my internship at the mental health hospital that he owns. I knew that Doctor could teach me lots of things, and that happened, so he trained me to assess cognitive impairments, diagnosed and treatment, misbehavior problems, mental health diseases, and…