Introduction Mental Health Values, Beliefs, Attitudes & Ethics
Introduction
Mental Health
Values, Beliefs, Attitudes & Ethics
Mental Health
It’s a term used to describe either a level of cognitive or
emotional wellbeing or an absence of a mental disorder.
It’s a psychological state of well-being that enables the individual to do:
productive activities, continue personal growth from early childhood until late life, sense the purpose in life, self-acceptance, fulfill the relationships with other people, the ability to adapt to change, cope with adversity, and resolve conflicts.
The absence of mental illness [psychologists consider this definition too narrow].
Dimensions of Mental Health
Self-acceptance, or self-esteem, characterized by a positive evaluation of oneself and one’s past experiences;
Personal growth reflected in one’s sense of continued psychological growth and development;
A sense that one’s life has purpose and meaning;
Positive relations with others;
Environmental mastery, the capacity to manage effectively in the surrounding world
Autonomy, a sense of self-determination and the ability to control one’s own life.
Factors that Influenced by Mental
Health
Working life,
Family life,
The social role that one occupies in the community.
Negative experiences in these areas can reduce one’s overall sense of well-being.
Mental Illness
It’s a term that refers collectively to all mental disorders
ranging from those that cause mild distress to those that
severely impair a person’s ability to function.
Mental disorders are psychological conditions or syndrome that characterized by disturbances in a
person’s thoughts, emotions, or behavior that causes significant
distress, disturbed functioning, disability, or
increased risk of harm or pain to one's self or others.
Mental health professionals sometimes use the terms
psychiatric disorder or psychopathology to refer to mental illness.
The effect of Mental Illness
Severe mental illness almost always alters a person’s life dramatically.
People with severe mental illnesses experience
disturbing symptoms that can make it difficult to:
hold a job, go to school, relate to others, cope with ordinary life demands.
Some individuals require hospitalization because they become unable to care for themselves or because they are at risk of committing suicide.
Onset of Mental Illness
Research indicates that the onset of a mental illness often results from complex interactions of biological, psychological and social factors
Severe mental illness
For example people who develop:
Schizophrenia may hear voices inside their head that say nasty things about them or command them to act in strange or unpredictable ways.
Paranoia—the deep conviction that everyone, including their closest family members, wants to injure or destroy them.
Depression may feel that nothing brings pleasure and that life is so dreary and unhappy that it is better to be dead.
Panic disorder may experience heart palpitations, rapid breathing, and anxiety so extreme that they may not be able to leave home.
Episodes of mania may engage in reckless sexual behavior or may spend money indiscriminately, acts that later cause them to feel guilt, shame, and desperation.
Other mental illnesses
Other mental illnesses create certain problems in living, such as people with:
Personality disorders may experience loneliness and isolation because their personality style interferes with social relations.
Eating disorder may become so preoccupied with their weight and appearance that they force themselves to vomit or refuse to eat.
Post-traumatic stress disorder may become angry easily, experience disturbing memories, and have trouble concentrating.
Attitudes toward Mental Illness
In most societies mental illness carries a substantial
stigma, or mark of shame. The mentally ill are often blamed for bringing on their own illnesses, and others may see them as victims of bad fate, religious and moral violation.
Such stigma may keep families from acknowledging that a family member is ill. Some families may hide or
overprotect a member with mental illness—keeping the
person from receiving potentially effective care—or they may
reject the person from the family.
It May Lead To:
Underfunding Of Mental Health Services And Terribly
Inadequate Care.
The mentally ill are chained, caged, or hospitalized in filthy, brutal institutions.
Affects health education and advocacy for the mentally ill.
Values
are the guide lines that provide the standards for our actions and making choices or decisions
(behaviors or modes of conduct).
values are at the basis of choice
reflect their perception of what is right or wrong which are more or less important, at a particular time.
For example: hard work, honesty, sincerity, cleanliness, and orderliness.
Once a value is internalized it becomes, either consciously and unconsciously. But most of our values remain at the unconscious level.
Where do our values come from?
Our culture
Our parental and familial influences
Our teachers
Friends
Media (television an internet)
How do we acquire values?
Pre-school period: observation, learn right and wrong
School period: development of working habit, problem solving and decision-making.
Teen years: identifying their significant values
Adulthood: individual value system is fully established.
Values can be shaped by culture, society, personality and experience.
Types of Values
Instrumental values
Consist of personal characteristic or traits.
Involve ways of being that help us arrive at terminal values. They are ways of triggering our terminal values.
Terminal values are
Those things that we can work toward or we think are most important and that we feel are most desirable.
End states of feeling; they are the emotional state that you prefer experiencing.
Terminal values make our life fulfilling and worthwhile.
Examples
Instrumental Values
Ambitious (Hard-working, aspiring)
Terminal Values
A world at Peace (free of war and conflict)
Capable (Competent, effective) Freedom (independence, free choice)
Cheerful (Lighthearted, joyful)
Clean (Neat, tidy)
Courageous (Standing up for your beliefs)
Forgiving (Willing to pardon others)
Equality (brotherhood, equal opportunity for all)
Self-respect (self esteem)
Happiness (contentedness)
Wisdom (a mature understanding of life
Important values for health care professional:
Concerns for the welfare of others.
Respect for human dignity.
Equality
Justice.
Truth
Freedom
Acceptance.
CARING.
Changing Values
Values tend to be fairly stable throughout
your lifein response to changing life experiences .
There may be minor changes in those things that are most important to you, and how much you value one thing over another may change during different stages of your life.
Values clarification
Values clarification will not tell you what your values should be, it simply provides the means to discover what your values are. A step-bystep process that encourage one to identify significant values.
This helps the health care providers to become aware of how their values affect their interaction with their clients.
Values Clarification Process
Choosing: consider all possible alternatives, consider all possible consequences and choose freely without pressure from others.
Prizing: cherish or prize the choice, share choice with others, reaffirm importance of value.
Acting: make value a part of behaviors
(internalize value), generalize value to all situation and repeatedly act with consistent behavior pattern and integrated into the life style.
Values in conflict
We all have a number of personal and professional values. In certain situations, it may become apparent that some of these values are in conflict. For example:
Life and alleviating pain:
A health care provider may value life and alleviation of pain.
working with a terminally ill patient a conflict may
arise. By providing intravenous fluids, the patient's life is sustained but pain is prolonged rather than alleviated.
Value must change?
Inconsistent values
What if values are inconsistent with one another?
Will cause to jeopardized professional role and feelings of discomfort or frustration are likely to emerge.
Such religious beliefs conflict with professional responsibilities.
ABORTION.
Beliefs
Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or argument to be true without necessarily being able to adequately prove its main contention to other people who may or may not agree.
Beliefs are ideas that one holds to be true.
For example of beliefs which have no evidence to substantiate them
“All old people are hard of hearing,”
“If the sun is shining, it will be a good day”.
Attitude
“a relatively enduring
يبسنلا تابثلا
organisation of beliefs, feelings, and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols” (Hogg & Vaughan 2005, p150)
Attitudes color how one look at the world
and people such as hopeful, optimistic, pessimistic, positive, and negative.
Origins of Attitudes:
Classical Conditioning
Instrumental Conditioning
Imitation (Social Learning Theory),
(Bandura 1977):
Attitudes are learned through imitation and modelling. Parents and society influence attitude.
Ethics
Set of rules or values which are explicitly adopted تدمتعا
ةحارص by a group of people that govern right behavior.
Ethics tend to be codified into a formal system (e.g
medical ethics)
The goal:
Protect the rights of people.
Act as guidelines for standards of practice.
Let the public know what behaviors can be expected from health care providers.
Unethical = unprofessional.
Some Main Ethical Principles
1.
1.
Autonomy: acknowledge that person’s right to make choices and take action based on that person’s own values and belief system and what one believes to be in one's best interests.
It is the concept of self-determination, of being in charge of one's person. From this principle of autonomy comes our commitment to respect clients’ choices in treatment and their need to make informed choices about matters of life and death. The rights to
refuse treatment, to privacy, to truth-telling and to confidentiality are also duties which evolve from this principle.
Beneficence and Nonmaleficence: ءاذيلاا مدعو ناسحلاا
“do good and avoid evil”: chose the best therapeutic procedure for the patient. Do no harm. But sometime you need to relatively
harm the patient to do good such as pain and painful procedures?
3.
4.
4.
Human Dignity: that every human being should be acknowledged as an inherently valuable member of the human community and as a unique expression of life, with an integrated bodily and spiritual nature.
Distributive Justice: requires that everyone receive equitable access for medical care and facilities. All clients are treated equally, fairly and respectfully.
Informed Consent: freely and voluntarily consenting or refusing consent to recommended medical procedures, based on a sufficient knowledge of the benefits, burdens, and risks involved.
6.
Confidentiality: ةيرسلا
7.
respect patient private information.
Veracity: always tell the truth.
قدصلا
Religious Freedom individuals should never be forced to act in a manner contrary to their religious beliefs and that they have the right to refuse participation in any treatment or procedure that is contrary to their conscience, nor should they be restrained from acting in accordance with their own beliefs, within due limits.
Guidelines for Making Ethical
Decisions:
Identify all elements of the situation: data, people.
Gather relevant information: try to make an ideal picture of the resolution of the dilemma.
List and order values: list the principles involved in order of importance and then decide.
Take an action: implement the plan and monitor any changes.
Evaluate the effectiveness of the plan.
