Mental health problems

Scarcity necessitates choice how can resources be used to best effect What criteria might we use in making those decisions One of the most important will be effectiveness— the abilities of treatment and support resources to improve the health and quality of life of people with mental health problems but, as we have seen, increasingly attention is also being paid to the costs of achieving those effects. The generic term for the criterion that combines effectiveness with resource considerations is efficiency. A third criterion of importance is equity or fairness in the distribution of access to treatment resources, the burden of financing them, or of their effects on health and quality of life. 

Techniques are needed to record services used by patients, families and others affected by a mental health problem or its treatment. Techniques are also needed to calculate the associated unit costs. These are separate activities. Many instruments have been developed to collect service utilization data. The one that my own research teams employ and which has been widely used elsewhere is the Client Service Receipt Inventory (CSRl ... 

For some mental health problems such as severe dementia, effectiveness might actually be achieved by slowing down a deteriorative trend or accelerating an upward trend. This makes effectiveness difficult to assess without a control or comparison group, or a set of norms, and emphasizes why naturalistic studies alone are rarely sufficient as an evidence base for clinical or policy decisions. 

Some people find that carmabis makes them anxious and paranoid, both inexperienced users or people who are anxious or those who consume strong varieties or high doses of cannabis. Very heavy use by people who already have a predisposition to mental health problems may lead to very distressing experiences. 

What happens when you go to your primary-care physician Do you feel that he is engaged with you Does she make frequent eye contact Does he ask enough questions, and does she seem to listen when you answer them Or does he seem impatient and rushed, spending more time looking at a laptop computer than at you The way in which a clinician interacts with her patients can affect the outcome of treatment - and not just of treatment for mental-health problems, but treatment for physical conditions as well.1... 

After the client is safe and committed to treatment, other important problems may be addressed effectively. For a client with a drug problem, the next priority is to address problems directly related to drug use behavior. These problems in the third tier may include consequences of drug use in all the domains that have been discussed in this book, or may include behaviors that contribute to drug use. Many of those behaviors that contribute to drug use may be associated with other health or mental health problems. In such instances, a treatment plan will... 

What associations can there be between falls in old age and drugs During the last decades, a number of scientific studies have been performed to examine if there are associations or not (Blalock et al. 2005, Leipzig et al. 1999a,b). Several of these studies have shown that many different kinds of drugs increase the numbers of falls and especially in people 65 years or older. These falls can lead to both physical injuries and mental health problems in elderly with consequences for a long time afterwards. 

On Prozac, Sisyphus might well push the boulder back up the mountain with more enthusiasm and more creativity. I do not want to deny the benefits of psychoactive medication. I just want to point out that Sisyphus is not a patient with a mental health problem. To see him as a patient with a mental health problem is to ignore certain larger aspects of his predicament connected to boulders, mountains, and eternity. 

Kataoka, S.H., Hima, B.T, Dupre, D.A., Moreno, K.A., Yang, X., and McCracken, J.T. (2001) Mental health problems and service use among female juvenile offenders their relationship to criminal history. / Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 40 549-555. 

Motivated by the mental health problems of returning soldiers from World War II in 1946, the National Mental Health Act gave the surgeon general the authority to promote mental health through research. This law led to the creation of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1949. 

If you are currently having mental health problems or have a history of same, don t take Salvia without first discussing it with your mental health practitioner. 

Mamtani R, Cimino A. A primer of complementary and alternative medicine and its relevance in the treatment of mental health problems. Psychiatr Q. 2002 73 367-381. 

Mental health of the drug taker. People with a history of mental health problems are more likely to have bad trips, although negative experiences also occur in people with no such history. 

A third reason LSD users might require medical attention is when they develop LSD psychosis. As mentioned earlier, regardless of the underlying cause of psychosis, the best treatment appears to be the same as that used for people who have similar mental health problems not related to taking LSD. So, a person with psychosis following an LSD trip generally responds as well to antipsychotic therapy as a person who develops psychosis without taking LSD does. 

Psychedelic use can carry with it two long-term mental health problems that can be quite disturbing. These conditions are hallucinogen-persisting perception... 

A teen s basic personality structure is intimately intertwined with all other predictive factors of marijuana use. Researchers have long hypothesized that marijuana causes a teen to behave or act in certain ways. Often, heavy marijuana use in adolescence is associated with such traits as poor school performance, delinquency, acts of violence, laziness, mental health problems, and so on. 

Evidence suggests that for people without mental health problems, antidepressant drugs are unpleasant to take and make them feel worse. The evidence reviewed in the previous chapter suggests that we have no reason to believe that they elevate mood in patients either. 

There was a marked increase in the proportion of the population who received outpatient treatment for mental health problems, but this care was often provided by primary care physicians. 

Also, many patients used multiple venues to treat their mental health problems—self-help groups, human services (school counselors and ministers), primary care, and specialty mental health services. 

This book is the result of our collective search for better ways to care for patients with mental health problems. Its purpose is to provide the information a non-MD therapist needs to know about psychotropic medication and collaborative care. It is intended for nonprescribing clinicians who work in mental health. We wrote it with two objectives in mind to give readers a basic sense of pharmacotherapy for various mental health disorders, and, more important, to provide a conceptual framework, a mind-set, and specific approaches for working in a collaborative care environment with medical professionals who do prescribe psychotropics. 

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