Introduction to Mental Health

1. Introduction to Mental Health The Stigma The History Trepanation St. Vitus’ Dance

2. Stigma and Mental Illness • The lives of people with mental health conditions are often plagued by stigma as well as discrimination.   • Stigma is a negative stereotype.  Stigma is a reality for many people with a mental illness, and they report that how others judge them is one of their greatest barriers to a complete and satisfying life.

3. Stigma is the negative treatment that may result from a condition or experience one may experience • Mental Health patients experience “negative treatment” due to stereotypes that exist around their condition • Discrimination results on multiple layers (intersecting) • For example, a woman with a mental illness may experience discrimination due to sexism as well as her illness, and a racialized individual may experience discrimination due to racism in addition to their mental illness.  • In addition,  living with discrimination can have a negative impact on mental health.

4. Media plays a key role in shaping public opinion • People with mental health conditions are often depicted as dangerous, violent and unpredictable. • News stories that sensationalize violent acts by a person with a mental health condition are typically featured as headline news • Good things aren’t reported • Entertainment frequently features negative images and stereotypes about mental health conditions, and these portrayals have been strongly linked to the development of fears and misunderstanding.

5. Impact of Negative Public Attitudes • Consequences to public stigma: Justified Bullying • Some individuals have been denied adequate housing, health insurance and jobs due to their history of mental illness. • Difficulty making friends leads to low self esteem • People who suffer from mental health issues are very reluctant to come forward due to the stigma and treatment from others.

6. Let’stake a closer look… • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTIZ_aizzyk

8. A BriefHistory of Mental Illness • Anthropological Connection • It is greatly important to look at how past societies have treated mental health– it gives us an understanding as to how we have developed our own biases. Results: • In all periods, mental illness is attached to those who are thought to be OUTSIDE the cultural norms • This greatly helps to explain why certain forms of behavior, such as expressions of religious fervor, depression, or wandering, have been considered quite normal in some historical and geographical contexts, while they have been considered to be forms of mental illness in others.

9. A Different take on Mental Illness • Native North Americans understood mental trouble as an indication of an individual who had lost his/her equilibrium (balance) with the world • In 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. • Ill health was considered to be a community problem, not just an individual problem, and so the response frequently involved the participation of many in the group in the form of healing ceremonies.

10. Early European settlers to Canada, in the 17th and 18th centuries closely linked mental troubles to demonic possession, God’s will, and to humeral imbalances. • Bizarre behavior among early settlers was often attributed to a person’s body having been plagued by demons or by the devil. • Exorcism was occasionally performed to remove the presence of the devil or demons. People also prayed to God to end the demonic presence in the sufferer. • A famous chapel at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré (near Quebec city), built in 1658, became the site of a regular pilgrimage of people who thought that through worshiping St. Anne, their physical and mental ills could be miraculously cured.

11. Treatment and Remedies • It is becoming clear to historians that home care of those considered mentally ill was a very important and persistent aspect of mental health history. • From the early settler period, a wide range of home remedies were used • In the 17th and 18th centuries, some combination of prayers, and home remedies was often tried. Households that could afford it also often hired nursing care to help manage with the mentally unwell. Neighbors also helped to share the burden of mental illness by taking in a mentally disturbed relative or friend into their households until his/her condition improved (for a fee)

12. Perhaps the best known and most controversial form of mental health treatment in Canadian history is Asylum care. • By the mid 19th century, the first permanent “lunatic asylums” were established in the four eastern BNA colonies (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland) and in Ontario and Quebec. • By the turn of the 20th century, western Canada had also erected asylums. These institutions reflected a revolutionary form of health care for those considered “insane”. • 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

14. Trepanation- A Short Intro Clip • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84PWUXKKvLM

15. Trepanation • Trepanning is one of the oldest recorded surgical procedures and has been documented world wide. Although trepanning was used over many time periods, the procedure was first used in the Stone Age. Researchers have found evidence of trepanation used in North America, South America, Africa, and Europe (Missios, 2007)

16. Gradual scraping of the skull in small circles was the most common used technique. Many North American Indian tribes, including Kwatkiutl and Pueblo Indians, used techinques very similar to trepanation to treat the mentally ill. • During the Stone Age, doctors used sharpened stones to scrape the skull and drill holes into the head of the patient. Over the years, wooden trepans and then metal trepans were used in addition to stones (Missios, 2007). Circular or rectangular holes would be cut by drills such as the one pictured to the left. The procedure was performed on men, women, and children, but predominantly on males.

17. St. Vitus’ Dance • Think about the followingquote. Discussitwith a partner. Shareyourideaswith the class. “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. – Charles Mackay

18. In 1374, dozens of villages along the Rhine River were in the grips of a deadly plague—a dancing plague called choreomania. By the hundreds, villagers took to the streets leaping, jerking, and hopping to music no one else could hear. They barely ate or slept, and just danced, sometimes for days on end, until their bloodied feet could support them no more. • The plague swept the countryside and, almost just as suddenly as it had come, disappeared. Until July 1518, in Strasbourg, when a woman called Frau Troffea picked up the tune again and danced for days on end. Within a week, she was joined by 34 people; by the end of the month, the crowd had swelled to 400

19. So what happened? Historians, psychologists and scientists have tried to forensically get to the bottom of the dancing mystery. For a while, the prevailing theory was that it was a mass psychotic episode sparked by eating bread tainted by ergot, a mold that grows on the stalks of damp rye. When consumed, it can cause convulsions, shaking and delirium. • John Waller, a history professor at Michigan State University, disagrees: “According to all contemporary accounts of both outbreaks, the sufferers were dancing, not convulsing. As to the other popular theory, that the victims were part of some heretic dancing cult, Waller says there’s nothing to suggest that they wanted to dance.”

20. Waller has a different theory- these plagues were mass psychogenic illnesses, sparked by pious fear and depression. • Both manias were preceded by periods of devastating famine, crop failures, dramatic floods, and all manner of Biblical catastrophe. Anxiety, fear, depression, and superstition—in particular, the belief that God was sending down plagues to persecute the guilty made people susceptible to falling into this kind of involuntary trance state. • Dancing plagues were the calling card of one St. Vitus, an early Christian martyr venerated with dance parties, meaning that the idea was already in the victims’ heads. All it took was one person to start it, and then everyone else followed.