Treatments for Mental Health Issues

There are a number of different treatments for mental health issues and these treatments, as one might expect, differ based on the individual and the disorders that he or she is suffering from and the severity of those disorders.  In general, most mental health disorders can be treated using either psychosocial therapy of some sort or a pharmaceutical treatment or, most likely, some combination of the two of those treatment options.

Psychosocial treatment and other counseling options work in a couple of different ways.  Some forms such as psychoanalysis, which was based on the work of Sigmund Freud in the early part of the twentieth century seek a method known as a “talking cure” where repressed traumas which are thought to be causing the adverse symptoms are brought to the surface by talking about them.  There are many other types of counseling treatments including psychiatry and psychotherapy which also look in some ways to help patients deal with any trauma that they may have suffered.  For example, in the case of an individual with dissociative identity disorder, the psychotherapist might seek ultimately to help the individual reunify their psyche by getting them first to identify the different personalities that they may have created as a coping mechanism and then finally to deal with the trauma that the patient may have suffered in the past and necessitated the creation of that persona.

There are also a wide variety of medical and pharmaceutical treatments available.  In cases such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) a physician might prescribe a stimulant such as Ritalin.  Depressed patients may be prescribed a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or SSRI such as Zoloft.  Depending on the particular condition that the health care professional is attempting to address through the use of pharmaceuticals, the specific drugs in question will obviously vary.  However, it should be noted that in most cases pharmaceutical treatments of mental health disorders will not cure the patient of the disorder.  Rather, they allow for the maintenance of the adverse symptoms associated with the disorder and allow for other, potentially psychosocial means of treatment to take effect.  In most cases a combination of both forms of treatment are required and in more difficult cases pharmaceuticals may be prescribed in order to facilitate increasingly productive group or individual therapy sessions in an attempt to curb problematic behaviors of complexes.

National Institute of Mental Health

There are twenty-seven component parts of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), with a budget of about 1.4 billion dollars, is an important one of them as an important research agency dealing with biomedical and behavioral issues and operates under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The mission of the National Institute of Mental Health is the reduction of the burden of mental illness and behavioral disorders by focusing their efforts on research.  It is hoped that this research will allow for the prevention of a variety of mental illnesses as they attempt to gain a more powerful understanding of how the mind and brain interact with observable behaviors. 

As such, the National Institute of Mental Health’s research efforts focus on mental disorders and the functioning of the brain in relation to behavior by funding these types of research at universities and at hospitals.  The NIMH also conducts its own research and data analysis and on top of these responsibilities it also does its best to communicate this information not only to the medical and health care professionals but also to the media and the general public.  Employing about five hundred scientists, the National Institute of Mental Health conducts this independent research in a structure that is specially built to allow for a variety of interdisciplinary studies.  At the same time NIMH also funds external research through over two thousand grants and contracts that it uses to support that research.

National Mental Health Institute Hotline

The National Mental Health Institute suggests that if any individual who is suicidal or is thinking of potentially harming themselves that they should do as many of the following as is necessary to get help immediately: call your doctor’s office, call 911 to obtain emergency services in your area, go directly to the nearest hospital emergency room or call the mental health hotline that the NIMH operates.  It is called the National Suicide Prevention Life and is available at 800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255) through which it is possible to be connected to a trained counselor at a nearby suicide crisis center. 

In addition, the National Institute of Mental Health recommends that should you have a family member or friend who could be considered suicidal that they not be left unattended.  If at all possible the suicidal individual should be helped to get to a hospital emergency room where they can receive emergency medical attention.  One should never underestimate the potential danger of even seemingly minor remarks that express a wish to commit suicide and as such any suicidal individual should be helped to seek immediate medical attention.