D240 TMA01 Summarise and discuss the presentations of mental health in the two newspaper articles

D240 TMA01 Summarise and discuss the presentations of mental health in the two newspaper articles

Summarise and discuss the presentations of mental health in the two newspaper articles

One in four people will experience a mental health problem at some time, with difficulties related to fear and sadness being the most common for people to report. The conceptualisation of, and treatment for mental distress is often referred to using the diagnostic terms ‘depression’ or ‘anxiety’ and inspire a great deal of research and debate. The present assignment will discuss two newspaper articles which illustrate strikingly different ways of understanding mental illness. It will include considerations of mental illness from both a purely biological perspective and a biopsychosocial perspective, and will also consider the problems with diagnosis and stigma and societal attitudes to mental health.
The Guardian (Meikle and Campbell, 2015) sees mental health experts coming together in an attempt to raise awareness to the psychological effects of austerity. The article highlights how people’s psychological experience is exacerbated by their social situations, by locating the causes of mental health problems to the wider social world; particularly to experiences of poverty and unemployment. Mental health professionals are troubled by the effect ‘back-to-work’ programmes are having on their patients, understanding them as more punishing than beneficial on their psychological wellbeing. This brings to light how neoliberal thinking is seeing mental health as simply an economic function; more about meeting targets than having people’s best interests at heart.
The Daily Mail (Gray, 2015) discusses how Canadian psychiatrists have highlighted a link between clinical depression and brain inflammation that might be crucial in better understanding depression’s physical impacts on the body, as well as in developing better treatments for these mental health issues. Researchers found that patients with clinical depression had a 30 percent increase in brain inflammation compared to...

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