Summarise and discuss the presentations of mental health in the two newspaper articles given in Appendix 1.
In this essay, I will summarise how both newspaper articles in Appendix 1 present mental health. I will also compare and contrast the articles with each other, as well as compare them to what I know about mental health and the history behind it including psychopharmaceuticals and psychotherapies.
The first article, titled ‘six in ten of us have faced mental issues such as stress or depression’, focuses on the amount of people currently struggling with mental health issues in Briton today.
The article states that according to a recent survey, 60% of people have struggled mentally with stress, anxiety or depression at least once…show more content… Homeless, poverty and despair characterised the nation. It was Herbert Hoover, the current President of the United States that declared the downturn a depression rather than a panic and the name stuck (http://us.history.wisc.edu).
During the time of the Great Depression, Psychiatric care was very limited. Depression and Schizophrenia had no particular treatment, so were given sedatives to dull the nervous system, hydrotherapy involving hot or cold baths for hours at a time, and shock therapy including electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Later in the decade, after an experiment carried out by two neurologists at Yale University, the lobotomy was born. This was a procedure where the frontal lobes of the brain were removed, thus changing the violent/depressive/mental instability area of the personality. Once this work was recognised, the procedure was carried out on a live patient resulting in successful results, the patient was calm and no longer anxious (http://www.psychosurgery.org).
This resulted in a mixed reception, a huge number of psychiatrists were very upset at the idea that surgery involving removing healthy brain tissue could cure mental illnesses. After 20 years of the reign of lobotomies, in the 1950’s, drugs replaced these. Psychosurgery has now been replaced by drugs and therapies; however, some Doctors are interested in reviving the surgery
