History of Mental Health in the US
UMW Fall 2023
Hawaii has the highest per capital rate of homelessness in the nation. About a third of homeless in Hawaii suffer from mental illness. This 2019 article discusses the strengthening of Hawaii’s Assisted Community Treatment Law, first enacted in 2013, whose goal was to compel severely mentally ill to receive psychiatric treatment when they are a …
Continue reading “Implementation of Hawaii’s “Forced Treatment” Law”
This article reveals that studies show that artists are more prone to mental illness than the general population. Citing a Scientific American article, this article shows that writers and artists are “20 times more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder…and 10 times more likely to suffer from depression.” The article argues that while mania and …
Continue reading “The Connection Between Art and Mental Illness”
Ron Howard’s 2001 film A Beautiful Mind is a dramatization of the mental illness struggles of Nobel laureate mathematician John Nash (1928-2015). The film is important for having introduced to the public what schizophrenia actually is, and how someone with schizophrenia may perceive the world. Nash, played by Russell Crowe, is a brilliant mathemetician who believes he …
Link to my project: http://pegasus74.org/ptsd-from-vietnam-to-iraq-and-afghanistan/
This ABC News article from 2006 talks about the accuracies and inaccuracies from the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind. What was accurate in the film is that the main character, John Nash, displays the grandiose, and persecutory sorts of delusions that schizophrenics commonly have. Also, the film accurately portrays that medicines are not a magic …
This article on the Department of Veterans Affairs webpage gives a brief history of PTSD. The article states that PTSD may well have been a part of human experience since prehistoric times, but it was not until the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1) that physicians first made a systematic attempt to understand …
For my digital project, I plan on using WordPress to post the results of my research into how the treatment of PTSD has evolved from the Vietnam War to the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. I will investigate what factors contributed to the differences and similarities of PTSD as it is seen in veterans of …
Continue reading “PTSD in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Digital Project”
Article explores the prevalence of PTSD among different military subgroups of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. One of the findings of this article is that as of 2014, the incidence of PTSD was higher for veterans of Iraq (12.9%) compared to veterans of Afghanistan (7.1%). Authors surmise this discrepancy may be in part due …
http://pegasus74.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=543&action=edit
Article states the as many as 250,000 veterans of the Vietnam War suffer from symptoms of PTSD today. Many veterans did not get adequate help after they returned home in part due to the fact that PTSD was not even recognized as a mental disorder by the Department of Veterans Affairs until 1980. Another aggravating …
