Mental Health Article

The definition of mental health is psychological well-being and satisfactory adjustment to society and the ordinary demands of life. However, it also can be the field of medicine concerned with the maintenance of a person’s overall emotional and psychological condition. Hospitals and institutions working with the mentally handicapped have the obligation to heal their patients and re-engage them in society and to keep them safe, or keep society safe from them. How does being around hundreds of insane people help treat mental illness and how what does it mean to be mentally ill?

Darwin did not think highly of giving mental treatment to the hopelessly sick, even if care for the weak can strengthen the community, he thinks it is against his theory of survival of the fittest and that it can also weaken the community. In the mid 19th century Insane Asylums were developed to cure the mentally ill however most of the idiots and lunatics were never considered treatable so they were being hold in the facilities for control, to keep society safe. The state pays for these asylums however the patients are there for free and under poor conditions these patients aren’t able to recover so the asylums are very expensive for the state. Especially insane is that the incurable are held for most of their lifetime, so they cost probably about three times as much as a person that has a short curable visit to the Institution. In 1908 they opened an observation hospital in England that treated the people that thought they might go insane, so they aren’t treating the mentally ill but the people that might only go there because they are at a low point in their life. In 1909 one person in hundred and eighteen is mentally defective so either, idiotic insane or feeble-minded. In Nottinghamshire in 1910 they opened the first psychiatric center, called Criminal Lunatic Asylum, which was for the mentally insane considered dangerous. During around the same time in the Winston Churchill home secretary there was a strong supporter of sterilization, he proposed that about 100’000 moral degenerates are to be sterilized by force so there are less insane people. However his proposal was kept secret until 1992. Wars are a great source of physically wounded and mentally handicapped so in 1915 the government wanted the asylums to treat soldiers too, so they estimated about 56’000 beds for the sick and wounded soldiers. The mental health institutions were becoming stuffed, they have developed so many reasons that there were too many in the asylums, by 1950 there were up to five insane patients per room. So hard to heal patients by these low hospital standards; for example the Fulbourn Mental Health Hospital built 1858 that lacked funds, physical neglect and low morale. Additions to the slow progress of patients are the lobotomies, which are a treatment in which some connections in the brain between the frontal lobes and the prefrontal cortex. This method is unfavorable because psychotic treatments have proven to be more successful. Another critically viewed treatment is the electroshock therapy in which the anesthetized patient’s brain is electrocuted through controlled electroshocks. This way of healing is also criticized however it is supposed to induce therapeutic effects; however patients are to feel weary and disoriented. One of the best treatments however is institutionalization where a patient is placed in a privately owned institution where he fits in and introducing them back into society. This method seems most realistic because the big difference in the mentally challenged is that they do not fit into the society’s norm, by reintroducing them to society this problem is solved.

I believe mental health care has improved a lot since the eighteenth century however lots of improvements are still to be made.