Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Discussing Mental Illness

Blog Explosion is a traffic engine that has given me some great viewers over on Gaiatribe and Hypatia's Hoard of Reviews. It also introduces me to some interesting blogs along the way. A couple of these deal with various flavors of mental illness; anxiety seems big right now.

One of them gave me a shout-out today for a comment I left. We're talking about how and why the treatment of mental complaints lags behind that of physical complaints, and it started with a previous discussion about whether and why drugs can be helpful.

Basically, I have noticed certain patterns in dealing with friends who have mental challenges, and that has built up a little basket of ideas on the topic. Sometimes when an opportunity arises, I set one of them out. One of these days I need to flesh these out and present them in full. You can see bits of several here: different solutions work for different people because there are many different causes of mental complaints, and there's a difference between mental illness and mental </i> injury, and we just don't have ways of perceiving exactly what needs to be fixed let alone the ability to reach in and repair it. So we ... muddle.
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  • 36 comments
...go 2 levels up... Expand
raven_ap_morgan

Re: Hmm...

raven_ap_morgan

August 12 2009, 13:49:51 UTC 11 years ago

As an assumption, it may or may not apply to a particular person. Some people can get around a mental illness -- particularly if it's a single problem -- and be otherwise fine. But often mental illnesses gang up on a person, and often there are other physical or social hindrances, so that some people just wind up generally ineffective at producing anything approaching a normal or healthy life.

Interestingly enough, research clearly shows that in all cases, when an individual who is mentally ill participates voluntarily in competitive employment, he or she is less likely to be symptomatic. By competitive employment, I mean employment in the community under the same circumstances as people who are not mentally ill, as opposed to the kind of "protected" employment that has generally been provided by social service agencies. The Social Security Administration is currently doing a major study concerning this (I know this, because I'm in the study), and this has been the focus of the social service agency with which I am involved (http://www.thresholds.org).

If you want me to discuss this in more depth, let me know.

Raven
ysabetwordsmith

Re: Hmm...

ysabetwordsmith

August 12 2009, 16:59:47 UTC 11 years ago

That sounds interesting! It makes sense, too -- people would put more effort into behaving in an expected fashion at a regular job. However, I'd also want to check whether this is a genuine reduction in manifestation, or whether they're just burning extra energy to conceal their illness on the job. That is: does it make an overall improvement in people's lives, or just encourage them to pretend they're okay when they really haven't gotten any better? Because that is what should make the difference between whether or not this practice gets spread around.
raven_ap_morgan

Supported Employment

raven_ap_morgan

August 12 2009, 23:19:01 UTC 11 years ago

Actually, it's not a matter of whether the person behaves in an expected fashion, self-reported symptomology (depression, anxiety, and so on - but in the clinical sense) drops when the person is competitively employed. When the idea was first introduced, Thresholds did a major study themselves of whether this methodology is effective as a part of treatment, and the results were surprisingly good in favor of it. Employment is considered a part of therapy, not a result of it.

Follow this link (http://www.thresholds.org/find-services/supported-employment) for a brief description of the program. I can say for myself that when I am working (and the Thresholds program is an important part of getting my work going), I am less symptomatic - not because I'm expected to be (I have my own business and work from home), but simply because I am. And the research bears this out in other cases.

Raven

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