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Mental health: why is progress so slow? : Comments
By Tim Woodruff, published 17/10/2005Tim Woodruff argues those affected by mental illness can expect little improvement in mental health services.
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Posted by miacat, Friday, 21 October 2005 6:33:51 AM
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The Mental Health system poorly recognises the value-benefit of psychological support, to its clients. This is having adverse effect on the wellbeing clients, who are implicated by the Mental Health system, as “mentally ill”, in unsettling high numbers, transversely, throughout Australian society.
i.e., More than 80% of clients in Mental Health are unemployed. Here we must ask on what grounds were these people assessed as “mentally ill”, and is the diagnosis factors used to screen these people equitable, given we comprehend the decline in life quality indices, that surrounds issues of a persons unemployment?
In a high number of cases, I suggest Mental Health system perceives a poor understanding of non-medical care treatment strategies which may assist to alleviate human "disturbance", where wider social factors transpire and undermine the existence of "wellbeing" in its socio-economic context of the human experience. This is why Mental Health appears to have little or no capacity to deal with comorbidities associated to substance abuse, particularly among the growing number of dis-connected youth.
The Mental Health system appears to negate the value of a multi-disciplinary human resource approach where interrelated socio-economic and psychological issues affecting a majority of clients, contribute their poor sense of mental wellbeing.
Community-based resource access for example, needs to include strategic socio-economic and cultural-psychological support resources, if it is to enhance its capacity to deal with the strain imposed on clients suffering from socio-economic related disparities.
At present there is no one level of government that recognises the pressing burden of clients entangled in the system of Mental Health, that can be sourced to a social breakdown in life-quality indices. This is adding to a deterioration of general social wellbeing throughout society, and contributes inevitably to social breakdown resulting in a growing bulge of social drift.