unit 1

Question 1

first nation: mental health

Answer 1

• mental trouble as an indication of an individual who had lost his/her equilibrium with the cosmos in general, and with the rest of the group in particular.
• Native healing beliefs, health and mental health were inseparable, so similar combinations of natural and spiritual remedies were often employed to try to relieve both mental and physical illness
• dreams could weigh heavily on the individual

Question 2

Early European settlers

Answer 2

• mental troubles were intimately connected to spiritual and physical well being.
• Bizarre behavior among early settlers was often attributed to a person’s body having been plagued by demons or by the devil
• connections between mental health problems and an imbalance in the four humors that were thought to make up the human body: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile
• treatments including bloodletting, purges, emetics, and diets to deplete or restore one or more of the humors.

Question 3

home care and mental health

Answer 3

• Households that could afford it also often hired nursing care to help manage with the mentally unwel

Question 4

asylum treatment

Answer 4

• Run by asylum doctors and attendants (later psychiatric nurses), asylums were part of the same reform movement that led to more permanent schooling for children, reorganized prisons for criminals, and reformatories for wayward youth.
• Reformers and psychiatrists believed that carefully constructed and run lunatic asylums could dramatically increase the cure rates for many forms of madness

Question 5

Psychology

Answer 5

• In rigorous and sometimes lengthy patient/psychologist therapy sessions, psychologists carefully examined their patients’ unconscious desires, repressed urges, and their relationships with family and friends, to find explanations for their mental breakdowns and personality disorders.

Question 6

Radical Therapies

Answer 6

radical therapies were introduced into the asylum setting in the early 20th century. These included electroconvulsive therapy, malarial therapy, insulin therapy, the use of the drug Metrazol to induce convulsions, and the surgical procedure of lobotomy.

Question 7

psycho pharm

Answer 7

• many of these drugs enabled patients to rely less on permanent care at a psychiatric hospital, a change that would accelerate the movement to deinstitutionalization

Question 8

Deinstitutionalisation

Answer 8

• rapid exodus of patients out of psychiatric hospitals and into the community starting in the 1960s
• These developments led to a major push to replace psychiatric hospital care with care in general hospital psychiatric units, and with psychiatric services in the community.