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Deviance and Mental Illness

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Deviance and mental illness often go hand-in-hand. While not all deviants are considered mentally ill, almost all mentally ill persons are considered deviant (since mental illness isn not considered "normal"). When studying deviance, then, sociologists also often study mental illness.

The three main theoretical frameworks of sociology regard mental illness a little differently, however they all look to the social systems in which mental illness is define, identified, and treated.

Functionalists believe that by recognizing mental illness, society upholds values about conforming behavior. Symbolic interactionists see mentally ill persons not as "sick," but as victims of societal reactions to their behavior.

Finally, conflict theorists, combined with labeling theorists, believe that the people in a society with the fewest resources are the most likely to be labeled mentally ill. For instance, women, racial minorities, and the poor all suffer higher rates of mental illness than groups of higher social and economic status....

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“Switching” of Mood From Depression to Mania With Antidepressants

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Bipolar disorder often presents initially with one or more episodes of major depression, and an episode of mania or hypomania may first occur during treatment with an antidepressant, stimulant, or other agent with mood-elevating effects. Such “switching” of mood into mania, a mixed-state, or psychosis can be dangerous. This switching is particularly prevalent among juveniles and young adults exposed to treatment with an antidepressant or stimulant for a depressive, anxiety, or attention disorder.1 Such pathological shifts of mood and behavior may represent adverse drug actions or a manifestation of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

DSM-5 now considers that mood elevation with antidepressants justifies the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, whereas earlier editions considered it a drug-induced reaction. Before the development of modern psychopharmacology, distinctions between recurrent unipolar depression and bipolar disorder within a broad “manic-depressive” concept may not have been critical. Currently, however, the diagnostic distinction has considerable clinical significance for prognosis and...

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What Exactly is a Mood Stabilizer?

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Two decades ago, there was 1 drug in the mood stabilizer category: lithium carbonate. Carbamazepine was used in refractory cases and in a small number of specialty clinics. Valproate was entering the scene as a novel and effective mood stabilizer. Since then, it seems that every new anticonvulsant is evaluated for its mood-stabilizing properties. More recently, the atypical antipsychotic drugs have emerged as promising treatments for bipolar disorder, and the evidence supporting their efficacy rivals that of anticonvulsant medications. Other agents, such as calcium-channel blockers, have also been evaluated but have shown little evidence of mood-stabilizing properties. Guidelines for the treatment of bipolar disorder now focus on lithium, a selected number of anticonvulsants and an increasing number of atypical antipsychotic drugs as the principal agents. How does the finding that seemingly disparate classes of medication have a common domain of efficacy shape our definition of what constitutes a “mood stabilizer” and our understanding of their mechanisms of action?...

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Access To The Courts For Persons Subject To Lps Commitments

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This handout outlines the methods of obtaining access to the courts for persons subject to mental health commitments under the Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act.

I. 72-Hour Hold (Welf. & Inst. Code [WIC] §§5150 et seq.):

A. Habeas Corpus -- there is no specific statutory right to a writ of habeas corpus for persons detained on 72-hour holds.

However, all persons retain their fundamental constitutional rights to petition the courts for a writ of habeas corpus. Calif. Const., art.1, §11; U.S. Const., art.1, §9, cl.2. And, any person committed to a state hospital has a statutory right to a writ of habeas corpus. WIC §7250. In addition, every person unlawfully imprisoned or restrained of his or her liberty under any pretense whatsoever may bring a writ of habeas corpus to challenge the legality of the detention. Penal Code §1473.

Note: The above writ provisions are applicable to all mental patients, regardless of the length of the...

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To Combat Disability Hate Crime, We Must Understand Why People Commit It

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After the Equality and Human Rights Commission 2011 report on disability hate crime, Hidden in Plain Sight, the government agreed to publish perpetrator analysis. Yet despite repeated requests it has not. So the Disability Hate Crime Network, a voluntary group campaigning against the crime, carried out a small, online survey of 100 disabled people last month to ask them more about the perpetrators of hate crimes. We asked about the gender, race and age of the attackers, location of the incident, whether the attacker acted alone or in a group, and about perceived motivation.

More than half of respondents (57%) said they were attacked on the street, and one-fifth on public transport. A quarter of incidents occurred at home. Other people were attacked in pubs and shops, with some mentioning social media. Perpetrators were overwhelmingly white.

Around half (49%) of all attacks were group based...

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PERSPECTIVES: The Reservation Wages of Social Security Disability Insurance Beneficiaries

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Background

In the economics literature, the term "reservation wage" has been used with two different meanings. In the job search literature, the term refers to the lowest wage a person would accept if the person has to pay a positive sum to gain another job offer from a wage distribution (Mortensen 1986). In the labor supply literature (Killingsworth 1983), it has been used as the lowest wage at which a person will work, which has also been referred to as the "asking wage." In this article, the reservation wage is not used within the context of the job search literature given that most DI beneficiaries do not search for jobs (Hennessey and Muller 1994). Instead, the reservation wage is used in the same sense as that of the labor supply literature, as detailed below.

In the standard labor leisure choice model of the labor supply literature, individuals,,,

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Manipulating Disability, Accommodation, And Outcomes: Peer Perceptions Of Accommodation Unfairness

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Abstract

The Americans with Disabilities Act requires that some disabilities be accommodated to provide equal opportunity for workers with disabilities. However, if accommodations are seen as unfair, coworkers may refuse to cooperate with the accommodation recipient or may cause other problematic outcomes for that person or the organization, thereby jeopardizing the goals of the ADA. A study was conducted to determine how perceptions of unfairness were related to type of accommodation, disability, and possible task outcomes. The study results indicated that there were perceptions of unfairness when persons with disabilities were accommodated, particularly when the accommodation was viewed as reducing the inputs of the persons receiving it and when the accommodated person subsequently won the task. As expected, the interaction between receiving a useful accommodation and having the accommodated person subsequently win was also significant in producing even greater perceptions of unfairness.

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Federal Disability Program Induces Child Drugging In Low-income Families

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NewsTarget) A $10 billion federal disability program gives low-income parents a strong financial incentive to have their children diagnosed with behavioral disorders and prescribed powerful psychotropic drugs. This is the core finding of a recent Boston Globe in-depth investigation.

Congress created Supplemental Security Income (SSI) in 1974 to aid the aged, blind and severely physically disabled, such as children with cerebral palsy and Down syndrome. Yet per the Globe, half of today's SSI recipients are children diagnosed with mental disorders such as ADHD and bipolar. But to qualify, those children really need to be on prescription drugs. Per the SSI associate commissioner's own words, "medication helps confirm a diagnosis."

In 1990 only 8 percent of children received SSI funds for behavioral issues; by 2009, that percentage had soared to 53 percent. Shockingly, children under 5 form the fastest-growing segment of this steep trend.

The article's author, Patricia Wen, reports this has, "created, for...

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Mental Retardation and Mental Illness

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It’s one of my pet peeves. “He’s having behaviors,” says the new teacher. Argh! I hate that phrase. Of course he’s “having behaviors.” We all have behaviors. When we stop having behaviors, we’re dead. What she means, of course, is that her student is behaving in ways that are difficult, challenging, and unacceptable to her. She wants a behavior plan. She wants to get rid of the difficult behaviors. I want more information. Can we talk?

I think it’s a holdover from the old days. As recently as only thirty years ago, many people in the field thought that people with mental retardation could not have a mental illness. Some people even thought that people with mental retardation didn’t have feelings like the rest of us, or didn’t want to relate to other people, or were too “retarded” to make sense of things.

 It’s interesting and humbling to realize that when people...

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Position Statement 22: Involuntary Mental Health Treatment

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Policy

Mental Health America (MHA) believes that effective protection of human rights and the best hope for recovery from mental illness comes from access to voluntary mental health treatment and services that are comprehensive, community-based, recovery-oriented and culturally and linguistically competent. It is essential that the rights of persons with mental health conditions to make decisions concerning their treatment be respected. MHA urges states to adopt laws that reflect the paramount value of maximizing the dignity, autonomy and self-determination of persons affected by mental health conditions. Voluntary admissions to treatment and services should be made more truly voluntary, and the use of advance directives should be implemented.

MHA believes that involuntary treatment should only occur as a last resort and should be limited to instances where persons pose a serious risk of physical harm to themselves or others in the near future and to circumstances when no less...

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The Challenge to Mental Health and the Law, Part 1 Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

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The Facts and the Future

The basic thesis of the psychoanalytic psychiatrist, and I am still one, is that in order to understand where you are going, you have to understand where you have been. Therefore, let me begin by giving you a very brief developmental history of law and psychiatry. Of course, like all psychoanalytic history, this one is constructed from the peculiar point of view of the analyst and you should feel free to impute to me counter transference, repression, denial, reaction formation, projection and egocentricity.

My history begins with the decade of the 1950s, when psychiatry and, particularly, psychoanalysis had reached the peak of their power and influence in the United States. It was acceptable even for judges to announce that they had been psychoanalyzed. Two such federal judges stood out: Judge Jerome Frank and Judge David Bazelon. Frank is less well known to psychiatrists...

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Mental Health Grantmaking

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In the paper “What Do We Really Know About Foundations' Funding of Mental Health?” Ruth Tebbets Rousseau and Andrew D. Hyman present findings from their brief scan of quantitative data from the Foundation Center and qualitative information from foundation leaders. The authors note that grantmaking for mental health continues to decline as a proportion of health funding through 2006, with the top ten grantmakers in this area providing nearly 50% of grant dollars.

How can the mental health community and funders address this decline in giving, and identify areas to focus on? As mentioned in our last blog post, the nonprofit sector is gravitating toward integrated systems to assess nonprofit impact at the field level, and these approaches may help discover successful mental health programs and priority areas where more funding can be directed to.

In addition, Brousseau and Hyman note that since mental health is often an aspect of broader program areas, tracking and anal

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Urbanization and Mental Health

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Urbanization, defined as the increase in the number of cities and urban population, is not only a demographic movement but also includes, social, economic and psychological changes that constitute the demographic movement. It is a process that leads to the growth of cities due to industrialization and economic development (M. Tayfun Turan, Aslı Besirl 2008). The rapid increase in urban population worldwide is one among the important global health issues of the 21st century. According to the projections of the United Nations Population Division, by 2030, more people in the developing world will live in urban than rural areas; by 2050, two-thirds of its population is likely to be urban. The scenario in India is also affected by this trend. In India approximately 28% of the India’s population lives in cities and this is expected to increase to 41% by the year 2020 (UN World Urbanization Prospects 2008).

Urbanization brings with it a...

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The Impact of Mental Illness Stigma on Seeking and Participating in Mental Health Care

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Court-based problem-solving initiatives seek to address the growing number of mentally ill defendants that have entered the criminal justice system by focusing on the immediate pressures that have led to the development of the mental health court strategy, as well as the challenging applications for this therapeutically oriented judicial approach.

Links to related online resources are listed below. Non-digitized publications may be borrowed from the NCSC Library; call numbers are provided.

Mental Health Court Performance Measures (MHCPM). MHCPM is a set of 14 performance measures that offers court managers and administrators a tool to monitor the performance of mental health courts.

Developing a Mental Health Court: An Interdisciplinary Curriculum. The National Center for State Courts partnered with Council of State Governments to develop this free curriculum for courts wishing to develop a mental health court.

Waters, Nicole L. State Standards: Building Better Mental Health Courts. (2015). As formal mental health courts (MHCs) enter their third decade in existence, policymakers...

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Mental Health Courts Resource Guide

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Court-based problem-solving initiatives seek to address the growing number of mentally ill defendants that have entered the criminal justice system by focusing on the immediate pressures that have led to the development of the mental health court strategy, as well as the challenging applications for this therapeutically oriented judicial approach.

Links to related online resources are listed below. Non-digitized publications may be borrowed from the NCSC Library; call numbers are provided.

Mental Health Court Performance Measures (MHCPM). MHCPM is a set of 14 performance measures that offers court managers and administrators a tool to monitor the performance of mental health courts.

Developing a Mental Health Court: An Interdisciplinary Curriculum. The National Center for State Courts partnered with Council of State Governments to develop this free curriculum for courts wishing to develop a mental health court.

Waters, Nicole L. State Standards: Building Better Mental Health Courts. (2015). As formal mental health courts (MHCs) enter their third decade in existence, policymakers...

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Labeling You a Mental Health Patient

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I am advocating that we rethink the whole field of psychology. As we embark on rethinking what we mean by normal, what we mean by mental health, and what we mean by psychotherapy, a first step is removing the labels that we give to people who look for help with their "mental health problems" or who are sent for help for those "problems."

All "mental health disorder" labels ought to be rethought. They flow from a specious, incoherent definition of "mental disorder" and amount to little more than the affixing of fancy-sounding disorder labels to bundles of putative "symptoms." In addition-and the subject of this article-the very naming of the person who walks into the office of a "mental health provider" ought to be rethought. Is that person really a "patient"?

Right now those people are known as either "patients" or "clients." I'll tackle the problems associated with...

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