Mental Health and Mental Illness Fundamentals Part 2
Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes, PhD, LPC-MHSP, LMHC
Executive Director, AllCEUs Counseling Education
Podcast Host: Counselor Toolbox, Happiness Isn’t Brain Surgery
Objectives
~ Review Prevention strategies for mental illness
~ Identify the fundamentals, benefits and drawbacks of the most common treatments: Psychodynamic, behavioral, humanistic, and pharmacological
~ Identify the factors that can enhance utilization of services including providing culturally responsive services addressing unique coping styles, the role of the family in treatment, ways to address cultural barriers including mistrust and stigma.
~ Explore the recovery concept and its impact on mental health and mental illness across the lifespan
Prevention
~ Prevention has been conceptualized as
~ Primary: Stopping a problem behavior from ever occurring delaying the onset of a problem behavior
~ Secondary: Preventing recurrence or worsening
~ Tertiary: Reducing the impact of a problem behavior
~ Strengthening knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors that promote emotional and physical well-being
~ Promoting institutional, community, and government policies that further physical, social, and emotional well-being of the community
Prevention Premises
~ Theory and research based
~ Address the individual as well as the micro, macro and exosystem
~ Focus on strengths development
~ Enhancing protective factors
~ Reducing risk factors
~ Many mental health problems share some of the same risk factors for initial onset, so targeting those factors can result in positive outcomes in multiple areas
~ Abuse and neglect (direct or indirect)
~ Family discord (hostility, domestic violence divorce)
~ Low self-esteem
~ Lack of supportive family or peers
~ Lack of school or work success
~ Lack of involvement in prosocial activities
Protective Factors
~ Self regulation
~ Secure attachment
~ Effective communication skills
~ Effective interpersonal skills
~ Supportive family and peers
~ Consistent discipline and rules
~ Responsiveness of caregivers
~ Safe environment
~ Support for learning
~ School engagement
~ Positive parent and teacher expectations
~ Access to wrap around services
~ Good coping and problem solving skills
~ Opportunities for engagement in prosocial activities
~ High self-esteem and self-efficacy
~ Appropriate empathy
~ Future orientation
Risk Factors
~ Neurophysiological deficits (autism, epilepsy, cerebral palsy)
~ Difficult temperament
~ Chronic illness
~ Below-average intelligence or learning disability
~ Family dysfunction
~ Abuse or neglect
~ Social disadvantage
~ Overcrowding or large family size,
~ Family member with mental health or addictive disorder
~ Admission into foster care
~ Living in an area with a high rate of disorganization
~ Inadequate schools
Approaches to Treatment
~ Psychodynamic
~ The role of the past in shaping the present is emphasized
~ Belief in the unconscious, so that there is much from the past that influences our behavior of which we are not aware
~ Important part of psychodynamic psychotherapy is to make the unconscious conscious
Approaches to Treatment
~ Behavioral
~ Focuses on current behavior and observable actions
~ General principles of learning are applied to the learning of maladaptive as well as adaptive behaviors
~ The environment provides reinforcements and punishments that shape behavior (direct and vicarious)
Approaches to Treatment
~ Cognitive Behavioral
~ Explores how thoughts and environmental stimuli shape behavior and learning and how learning sh