Reference no: EM133517501
Assignment: Mental illness and mental health recovery- Critical Review
Length: 2500 words.
Overview
This assignment invites you to consider the underlying assumptions of the dominant model of mental illness and compare these with the principles of the recovery paradigm. It encourages you to think critically how these contrasting perspectives influence the assessment and treatment of mental health problems. In contemporary mental health care, clinical or case formulation continues to be exceptionally important and the capacity to make sense of a person's problems, rather than simply labelling or naming them, is an essential capability of all mental health professionals.
It is your opportunity to consider competing discourses which shape the need for other ways of being with people and assisting them than the dominant biomedical approach to mental health. You will do so by considering how a mental illness may be diagnosed and treated from a biomedical model. You are invited to consider the implications of formulating the from a psychotherapeutic framework. You will then consider the roles, virtues and competencies required to help the person from a position of biomedical discourse and the alternative framework.
Learning outcomes
This assessment task is aligned with the following learning outcomes:
I. Analyse and critique the dominant discourses and models of mental health and illness and how these and other formative influences have shaped mental health policy, legislation, professional standards, influenced mental health practice and the experience of care
II. Critically review the concept of the therapeutic alliance or relationship, its essential elements, how it can be developed and maintained, and argue its importance in contributing to collaboratively negotiated outcomes with service users.
III. Construct a clinical / case formulation drawing on psychotherapeutic theory, extant research and clinical reasoning which effectively addresses the holistic needs of the individual and families
Task
Is mental health recovery compatible with biomedical understandings of mental illness? Implications for the mental health workforce.
In essay format, your assignment should address the following:
Question A. Identify a single mental disorder as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (5 th Edition, Text Review) (DSM-5-TR) (American Psychiatric Association, 2022)1 and briefly describe the dominant biomedical discourse around the disorder and how this discourse informs expectations about assessment, aetiology, treatment and clinical recovery of that disorder.
Question B. Identify a person you have worked with, or a case study from the literature, with the same DSM-5- TR diagnosis as identified in Part 1. Drawing on alternative discourses around personal recovery and/or psychotherapeutic literature2 , describe an alternative way of formulating the problem. Briefly describe the implications for the process of care and treatment from this perspective.
Question C. Discuss the compatibility of the biomedical discourse with the alternative discourses around the problem.
Question D. Compare and contrast the skills, competencies and attitudes needed by mental health workers to effectively respond to a person with this diagnosis from these discourses.