Define and explain mental illness and mental disorders and describe the treatment of each in the United States

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Many medical professionals distinguish between a mental disorder—a condition that makes it difficult or impossible for a person to cope with everyday life—and mental illness

—a condition in which a person has a severe mental disorder requiring extensive treatment with medication, psychotherapy, and sometimes hospitalization.

The most widely accepted classification of mental disorders is the American Psychiatric Association's (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Many people seeking psychiatric assistance are treated with medications or psychotherapy—which is believed to help patients understand the underlying reasons for their problem and sometimes treatment in psychiatric wards of local hospitals or in private psychiatric hospitals. However, the introduction of new psychoactive drugs to treat mental disorders and the deinstitutionalization movement in the 1960s have created dramatic changes in how people with mental disorders are treated. Deinstitutionalization refers to the practice of rapidly discharging patients from mental hospitals into the community. Originally devised as a solution for the problem of "warehousing" mentally ill patients in large, prison-like mental hospitals in the first half of the twentieth century, deinstitutionalization is now viewed as a problem by many social scientists. The theory behind this process was that patients' rights were being violated because many patients experienced involuntary commitment (i.e., without their consent) to the hospitals, where they remained for extended periods of time. Instead, some professionals believed that the patients' mental disorders could be controlled with proper medications and treatment from community-based mental health services.