Download or read book The Environment and Mental Health written by Ante Lundberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental illness is a concept of growing concern to all health professionals. Patients with problems presumably caused by sick buildings, electromagnetic fields and hypersensitivity to chemicals--to name a few--are often referred to psychologists, psychiatrists, and other counselors. The battery worker with fatigue, headaches, abdominal pain and an elevated lead level...the assembly worker with pain and numbness in her hand and delayed median nerve conduction...the patient who develops typical contact dermatitis after working with epoxies..., these are straightforward cases. But they are in the minority. In many cases, needy, demanding, and difficult patients present complex and challenging psychological issues. Practitioners often lack the training or wisdom to handle these issues effectively. We know that exposure to lead, mercury, and PCBs affect psychological development and behavior; we know much less about the effects of thousands of other chemicals in the environment. In addition, global climate change, social disruption, and the spread of infections will--in the near future--expose people to novel environmental threats. Symptoms caused by toxins can overlap those caused by fear, stress, and depression, and the clinical picture can mimic a variety of other mental disorders. On the other hand, the natural environment can also be a healer. Research shows that hospital stays are shortened and the need for pain medication reduced for patients exposed to nature, even in images, or to the company of animals. Nursing home patients live longer if allowed to keep pets, and one controlled study shows that caring for animals reduces disruptive behavior in even the most difficult ADD children. This book offers the first overview of the many ways the environment can affect mental health and illness. It will prove to be an important and valuable resource for physicians in psychiatry, public health, and environmental medicine; for clinical and counseling psychologists and social workers; and for environmental researchers and advocates worldwide.
Download or read book Mental Health and the Environment written by Hugh Lionel Freeman and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mental Health and The Built Environment written by David Halpern and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores the relationship between the planned or built environment and the occurrence of mental ill-health. It begins by providing a broad overview of what is known about the causes of psychopathic behaviour. It then goes on to discuss the issues that arise when attempting to identify: the impact of the environment as a source of stress; the effects that the environment can have on the quality of relationships between people; and the relationship between symbolic aspects of the environment, the planning process and mental health. The book uses analysis and case studies drawn from the UK and US and contains example illustrations of the built environment.
Download or read book Mobile Technology for Adaptive Aging written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2020-10-25 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To explore how mobile technology can be employed to enhance the lives of older adults, the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine commissioned 6 papers, which were presented at a workshop held on December 11 and 12, 2019. These papers review research on mobile technologies and aging, and highlight promising avenues for further research.
Download or read book Frontiers in Mental Health and the Environment written by Marco Helbich and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2018-12-12 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Frontiers in Mental Health and the Environment" that was published in IJERPH
Download or read book U S Health in International Perspective written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.
Download or read book Healing Spaces written by Esther M. Sternberg MD and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Esther Sternberg is a rare writer—a physician who healed herself...With her scientific expertise and crystal clear prose, she illuminates how intimately the brain and the immune system talk to each other, and how we can use place and space, sunlight and music, to reboot our brains and move from illness to health.”—Gail Sheehy, author of Passages Does the world make you sick? If the distractions and distortions around you, the jarring colors and sounds, could shake up the healing chemistry of your mind, might your surroundings also have the power to heal you? This is the question Esther Sternberg explores in Healing Spaces, a look at the marvelously rich nexus of mind and body, perception and place. Sternberg immerses us in the discoveries that have revealed a complicated working relationship between the senses, the emotions, and the immune system. First among these is the story of the researcher who, in the 1980s, found that hospital patients with a view of nature healed faster than those without. How could a pleasant view speed healing? The author pursues this question through a series of places and situations that explore the neurobiology of the senses. The book shows how a Disney theme park or a Frank Gehry concert hall, a labyrinth or a garden can trigger or reduce stress, induce anxiety or instill peace. If our senses can lead us to a “place of healing,” it is no surprise that our place in nature is of critical importance in Sternberg’s account. The health of the environment is closely linked to personal health. The discoveries this book describes point to possibilities for designing hospitals, communities, and neighborhoods that promote healing and health for all.
Download or read book The Social Determinants of Mental Health written by Michael T. Compton and published by American Psychiatric Pub. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Social Determinants of Mental Health aims to fill the gap that exists in the psychiatric, scholarly, and policy-related literature on the social determinants of mental health: those factors stemming from where we learn, play, live, work, and age that impact our overall mental health and well-being. The editors and an impressive roster of chapter authors from diverse scholarly backgrounds provide detailed information on topics such as discrimination and social exclusion; adverse early life experiences; poor education; unemployment, underemployment, and job insecurity; income inequality, poverty, and neighborhood deprivation; food insecurity; poor housing quality and housing instability; adverse features of the built environment; and poor access to mental health care. This thought-provoking book offers many beneficial features for clinicians and public health professionals: Clinical vignettes are included, designed to make the content accessible to readers who are primarily clinicians and also to demonstrate the practical, individual-level applicability of the subject matter for those who typically work at the public health, population, and/or policy level. Policy implications are discussed throughout, designed to make the content accessible to readers who work primarily at the public health or population level and also to demonstrate the policy relevance of the subject matter for those who typically work at the clinical level. All chapters include five to six key points that focus on the most important content, helping to both prepare the reader with a brief overview of the chapter's main points and reinforce the "take-away" messages afterward. In addition to the main body of the book, which focuses on selected individual social determinants of mental health, the volume includes an in-depth overview that summarizes the editors' and their colleagues' conceptualization, as well as a final chapter coauthored by Dr. David Satcher, 16th Surgeon General of the United States, that serves as a "Call to Action," offering specific actions that can be taken by both clinicians and policymakers to address the social determinants of mental health. The editors have succeeded in the difficult task of balancing the individual/clinical/patient perspective and the population/public health/community point of view, while underscoring the need for both groups to work in a unified way to address the inequities in twenty-first century America. The Social Determinants of Mental Health gives readers the tools to understand and act to improve mental health and reduce risk for mental illnesses for individuals and communities. Students preparing for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) will also benefit from this book, as the MCAT in 2015 will test applicants' knowledge of social determinants of health. The social determinants of mental health are not distinct from the social determinants of physical health, although they deserve special emphasis given the prevalence and burden of poor mental health.
Download or read book Losing Our Minds written by Barbara Demeneix and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The exponential increases in neurodevelopmental disorders implicate both genetic causes and environmental factors. Flame-retardants, pesticides, plasticizers, and other every-day products contain chemicals shown to affect thyroid hormone signaling, which if disrupted can result in significant impairment to IQ. Across entire populations, such effects spell large-scale social and economic consequences. In this book Barbara Demeneix suggests what can and must be done to halt and reverse this disturbing trend.
Download or read book Mental Health and Illness in Urban Living written by Niels Okkels and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights a broad range of issues on mental health and illness in large cities. It presents the epidemiology of mental disorders in cities, cultural issues of urban mental health care, and community care in large cities and urban slums. It also includes chapters on homelessness, crime and racism - problems that are increasingly prevalent in many cities world wide. Finally, it looks at the increasing challenges of mental disorders in rapidly growing cities. The book is aimed at an international audience and includes contributions from clinicians and researchers worldwide.
Download or read book Environment and Mental Health written by Stephen M. Williams and published by . This book was released on 1994-11-29 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the link between the environment and mental health, this study describes how environmental influences help clinicians and researchers to understand mental illness and disabilities. It argues that the attention paid to environmental factors may af
Download or read book Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Anthropocene written by Jamie Mcphie and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes the unorthodox claim that there is no such thing as mental health. It also deglamourises nature-based psychotherapies, deconstructs therapeutic landscapes and redefines mental health and wellbeing as an ecological process distributed in the environment – rather than a psychological manifestation trapped within the mind of a human subject. Traditional and contemporary philosophies are merged with new science of the mind as each chapter progressively examples a posthuman account of mental health as physically dispersed amongst things – emoji, photos, tattoos, graffiti, cities, mountains – in this precarious time labelled the Anthropocene. Utilising experimental walks, play scripts and creative research techniques, this book disrupts traditional notions of the subjective self, resulting in an Extended Body Hypothesis – a pathway for alternative narratives of human-environment relations to flourish more ethically. This transdisciplinary inquiry will appeal to anyone interested in non-classificatory accounts of mental health, particularly concerning areas of social and environmental equity – post-nature.
Download or read book Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States written by US Global Change Research Program and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 999 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As global climate change proliferates, so too do the health risks associated with the changing world around us. Called for in the President’s Climate Action Plan and put together by experts from eight different Federal agencies, The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health: A Scientific Assessment is a comprehensive report on these evolving health risks, including: Temperature-related death and illness Air quality deterioration Impacts of extreme events on human health Vector-borne diseases Climate impacts on water-related Illness Food safety, nutrition, and distribution Mental health and well-being This report summarizes scientific data in a concise and accessible fashion for the general public, providing executive summaries, key takeaways, and full-color diagrams and charts. Learn what health risks face you and your family as a result of global climate change and start preparing now with The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health.
Download or read book Tie a Knot and Hang On written by Teresa L. Scheid and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tie a Knot and Hang On is an analysis of mental health care work that crosses the borders of diverse sociological traditions. The work seeks to understand the theoretical and empirical linkages between environmental pressures and activities and how these intersect with organizations and individuals. The work draws upon a research tradition that sees the issue of mental health care in terms of institutional pressures and normative values. The author provides a description and a sociological analysis of mental health care work, emphasizing the interaction of professionally generated norms that guide the "emotional labor" of mental health care workers, and the organizational contexts within which mental health care is provided. She concludes with a discussion of emerging institutional forces that will shape the mental health care system in the future. These forces are having greater impact than ever before as managed care comes to have a huge fiscal as well as institutional impact on the work of mental health professionals. Scheid's book is a brilliant, nuanced effort to explain the institutional demands for efficiency and cost containment with the professional ethics that emphasize quality care for the individual. The book is essential reading for those interested in mental health care organizations and the providers responding to these seemingly larger, abstract demands. The work offers a rich mixture not just of the problems faced by mental health care personnel, but the equilibrium currently in place û an equilibrium that shapes the theory of the field, no less than the activities of its practitioners. Teresa L. Scheid is associate professor of sociology, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has published widely in the area, including major essays in Sociology of Health and Illness, Sociological Quarterly, Perspectives on Social Problems, and The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.
Download or read book Nature and Nurture in Mental Disorders written by Joel Paris and published by American Psychiatric Pub. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last two decades, spurred particularly by the decoding of the genome, neuroscience has advanced to become the primary basis of clinical psychiatry, even as environmental risk factors for mental disorders have been deemphasized. In this thoroughly revised, second edition of Nature and Nurture in Mental Disorders, the author argues that an overreliance on biology at the expense of environment has been detrimental to the field -- that, in fact, the "nature versus nurture" dichotomy is unnecessary. Instead, he posits a biopsychosocial model that acknowledges the role an individual's predisposing genetic factors, interacting with environmental stressors, play in the etiology of many mental disorders. The first several chapters of the book provide an overview of the theories that affect the study of genes, the environment, and their interaction, examining what the empirical evidence has revealed about each of these issues. Subsequent chapters apply the integrated model to a variety of disorders, reviewing the evidence on how genes and environment interact to shape disorders including: Depressive disorders PTSD Neurodevelopmental disorders Eating disorders Personality disorders By rejecting both biological and psychosocial reductionism in favor of an interactive model, Nature and Nurture in Mental Disorders offers practicing clinicians a path toward a more flexible, effective treatment model. And where controversy or debate still exist, an extensive reference list provided at the end of the book, updated for this edition to reflect the most current literature, encourages further study and exploration.
Download or read book The Impact of the Environment on Psychiatric Disorder written by Hugh Lionel Freeman and published by Taylor & Francis US. This book was released on 2008 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Impact of the Environment on Psychiatric Disorder explores the relationship between the environment and mental health, and suggests that environmental factors can play a role in the causation of psychiatric illness. Hugh Freeman and Stephen Stansfeld bring together experts from the field to discuss a range of physical and social environmental settings that are linked to psychiatric disorders. International contributors discuss topics including: psychosocial processes linking the environment and mental health gene–environment interactions urban–rural differences social support migration how noise affects psychiatric disorders. The book closes with a discussion of how disasters such as global warming and terrorism can affect mental health, and highlights the risks and protective factors for psychiatric disorders following such events. The Impact of the Environment on Psychiatric Disorder illuminates the wide range of ways in which it is possible for the environment to influence mental health. It will appeal to both academics and professionals, and will interest anyone concerned with connections between the environment and mental health.
Download or read book Working in Mental Health written by Peter Phillips and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A paradigm shift in the ways in which mental health services are delivered is happening—both for service users and for professional mental healthcare workers. The landscape is being changed by a more influential service user movement, a range of new community-based mental healthcare programmes delivered by an increasing plurality of providers, and new mental health policy and legislation. Written by a team of experienced authors and drawing on their expertise in policy and clinical leadership, Working in Mental Health: Practice and Policy in a Changing Environment explains how mental health services staff can operate and contribute in this new environment. Divided into three parts, the first focuses on the socio-political environment, incorporating service user perspectives. The second section looks at current themes and ways of working in mental health. It includes chapters on recovery, the IAPT programme, and mental healthcare for specific vulnerable populations. The final part explores new and future challenges, such as changing professional roles and commissioning services. The book focuses throughout on the importance of public health approaches to mental healthcare. This important text will be of interest to all those studying and working in mental healthcare, whether from a nursing, medical, social work or allied health background.
