7.2 Mental Health and Connection to Human Services
7.2 Mental Health and Connection to Human Services
Like many of the topics in this text, mental health is a subject in which you will need to be well-versed in order to be a professional working in human services. Clients are usually dealing with some sort of adversity in their lives, and those circumstances can take their toll on mental health. Struggling with mental illness can also cause a ripple effect of other problems in one’s life—work or school performance issues, relationship problems, substance use, medical problems, and more.
Even if you do not plan to be a clinical social worker, counselor, or someone otherwise employed in the mental health field, it is imperative that you feel comfortable working with clients with mental health challenges. You will need to be able to recognize the signs and symptoms of many disorders so that you can help clients connect to the resources that can best assist them. Clients who are struggling with their mental health may not be able to work toward goals in any human services program until those needs are addressed or at least recognized.
This chapter is an introduction to some of the settings and problems you may encounter. Most importantly, we understand practitioners’ ethical scope of practice in the human services field with our skill set and training, as we want to help and not harm the communities we serve.
What Are Mental Health Disorders, Mental Health, and Mental Wellness?
We have come a long way in the terms we use for various psychiatric conditions, though we continue to modify our terminology seemingly at every step. However, it is not unusual for people still to use words like “crazy,” “unbalanced,” “nuts,” “out of it,” “psychotic,” and “insane” to describe those who are dealing with mental disorders. These words reflect many things: misunderstanding, fear, misinformation, miseducation, and more.
Many people do not have a firm understanding of mental health disorders. It is easier to think in hurtful terms like these to describe those who are dealing with mental disorders. As human service providers, we must advocate and educate not just clients and their families but also colleagues, family, and friends about these words and topics that will help reduce the stigma around mental health disorders, as depicted in figure 7.1.
You may hear the terms “mental illness” and “mental disorder” used interchangeably, and there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that approach. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fifth Edition-Text Revision), commonly called the DSM-5TR, uses the term mental health disorder to describe psychiatric diagnoses, and that is what we will use in this text. The DSM-5’s definition of mental disorder is as follows: “A syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning