Evaluation In Mental Health

The burden of mental illness on individuals, families, and communities has created profound challenges for our society. In recent years treatments and services for the mentally ill have moved almost exclusively to community settings, yet no comprehensive and progressive policies have emerged to counter stigmatizing and facilitate integration.

Innovative Approaches to Mental Health Evaluation is a collection of papers that provides a broad range of ideas, methods, and techniques in program administration and evaluation in the field of mental health. The book is organized into 2 sections. Part I, consisting of 8 chapters, presents the necessary evaluation strategies and approaches that effectively address the important mental health issues for the 1980s such as prevention programs; the linking of health and mental health delivery systems; accountability in assuring quality of services; deinstitutionalizing the chronically mentally ill; and providing for greater local participation in mental health program management. Part II, surveys the promising evaluation methods, approaches, and relevant issues that are emerging in the new organizational and political environment of the mental health system. The book will be of good use to mental health administrators, researchers, managers, students, and evaluators.

The presentation of mental illness at work has different implications and consequences depending on the specific nature of the job, work context, regulatory framework and risks for the employee, organisation and society. Naturally there are certain occupational groups where human factors and/or mental illness could impair safety and mental acuity, and with potentially devastating consequences. For pilots, the medical criteria for crew licensing are stipulated by regulatory aviation authorities worldwide, and these include specific mental illness exclusions. The challenge of assessment for mental health problems is, however, complex and the responsibility for psychological screening and testing falls to a range of different specialists and groups including AMEs (authorised aviation medical examiners), GPs and physicians, airline human resources departments, psychologists, human factor specialists and pilots themselves. Extending and developing the ideas of Aviation Mental Health (2006), which described a range of psychological issues and problems that may affect pilots and the consequences of these, this book presents an authoritative, comprehensive and practical guide to modern, evidence-based practice in the field of mental health assessment, treatment and care. It features contributions from experts in the field drawn from several countries, professions and representing a range of aviation-related organisations, displaying a range of different skills and methods that can be used for the clinical assessment of pilots and in relation to specific mental-health problems and syndromes.

The Perspectives approach to psychiatry focuses on four aspects of psychiatric practice and research: disease, dimensional, behavior, and lifestory. In Systematic Psychiatric Evaluation, Drs. Margaret S. Chisolm and Constantine G. Lyketsos underscore the benefits of this approach, showing how it improves clinicians' abilities to evaluate, diagnose, and treat patients. Drs. Chisolm and Lyketsos use increasingly complex case histories to help the mental health provider evaluate patients demonstrating symptoms of bipolar disorder, psychosis, suicidal ideation, depression, eating disorders, and cutting, among other conditions. The book also includes an exercise that simulates the Perspectives approach side by side with traditional methods, revealing the advantages of a method that engages not one but four points of view. Featuring a foreword by Drs. Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney, the originators of the Perspectives approach, this innovative book will be used in psychiatric training programs as well as by practicing mental health clinicians. -- Arnold E. Andersen, M.D., The University of Iowa College of Medicine

Many published books that comment on the medical model have been written by doctors, who assume that readers have the same knowledge of medicine, or by those who have attempted to discredit and attack the medical practice. Both types of book have tended to present diagnostic categories in medicine as universally scientifically valid examples of clear-cut diseases easily distinguished from each other and from health; with a fixed prognosis; and with a well-understood aetiology leading to disease-reversing treatments. These are contrasted with psychiatric diagnoses and treatments, which are described as unclear and inadequate in comparison. The Medical Model in Mental Health: An Explanation and Evaluation explores the overlap between the usefulness of diagnostic constructs (which enable prognosis and treatment decisions) and the therapeutic effectiveness of psychiatry compared with general medicine. The book explains the medical model and how it applies in mental health, assuming little knowledge or experience of medicine, and defends psychiatry as a medical practice.