In my social work class we get to do a research project focusing on a social issue of our choosing.
It can be anything from foster care, immigration, or any other social issue and its injustices (or your argument for how it is just).
I’m thinking of doing mine on the treatment of the mentally ill. I just dont know what I should focus on. Should I focus on how many are in jail when they should be in treatment centers? Should i focus solely on stigma? Or maybe I can focus on the history of mental health treatment, where we are now, and where I feel we need to go?
That’s a great idea! The only hard part would be quantifying what they say. Maybe quantify is the wrong word… I guess how would I use statistics and data to show their opinion?
Since it has to be backed by research I’m thinking of tackling mental health and the corrections system. I was listening to a ted talk, I think from Elyn Saks but I cant remember 100%, and she said that a county jail in California has the biggest psychiatric center in America. I would also like to talk about how in my state of Michigan there are like 7.3 psych beds per 100,000 residents, and the national average is 11.4 or something. Its astounding to me that there are people who cant get treatment until they end up in jail, and I’ve been reading a lot of them are in jail for substance abuse because there is a high comorbidity between mental illness and substance abuse.
Yeah. The number of times I’ve gone to the ER for help and been turned away because I want severe enough given how few needs we’re available at that time is appalling. That should never happen.
Or even having to wait in the ER for weeks until a bed finally opened up. Because it’s not like they treat you while you’re in the ER. They just let you get worse and worse.
I’m sorry that has happened to you. Treatment for mental health in the US is better in some ways and worse in others.
I hate that we can spend millions of dollars on things such as election campaigns, but we can’t put money into mental health, or homelessness, or drug rehabilitation. The drug rehabilitation one stings twice because what we would spend on rehabilitation we would save on prison costs.
I dont mean to get political, it’s just that what happened to you should never happen to anyone, ever.
LS! I did about fifteen research projects. The last two projects I did were SROI for Fountainhouse De Waterheuvel and a project about oral health for the Clientenraad GGz Arkin both with lots of interaction and information for the clients. Not just a questionnaire but having people play the ValueGame. So my advice is to try to do something in which the clients can participate.
What about the digital dimension of self-care/communal care? There is already good research done on online health communities not unlike this forum, so you could build on that. As for methods you could use online ethnography peppered with narrative analysis. All very doable.
Maybe you could write about what I see as the most humane way of dealing with the mentally ill, and that is having assisted living centers for them where they can get short term help or stay for years. I’ve lived in an assisted living center for eighteen years, with little real misery. The quality of the care in these places does vary, though.