HEALTH INEQUALITIES IN MENTAL ILLNESS HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE ESSAY

5000 WORDS

In this assignment the author will critically analyse the health inequalities that are evident for people with a diagnosis of a severe mental illness. He will particularly focus on the inequalities that exist in relation to the prevalence, identification and management of the physical health aspects for this set of complex conditions.

In the course of the assignment he will critically evaluate these health inequalities from an international, a national United Kingdom and a more local Scottish perspective.

In doing so he will critically examine a selection of health promotion approaches which underpin the physical healthcare of people with severe mental illness. He will also systematically evaluate the effectiveness of some of the differing approaches which contribute to the management of these conditions and the enhancement of the health and social wellbeing of mental illness sufferers across the world.

Definitions

In order to analyse the health inequalities the author will first define some of the key terms that he will refer to throughout the assignment.

Health was defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) (1948) as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.Though this is a useful and accurate definition, some would consider it idealistic and non-realistic. Using the WHO definition classifies 70-95% of people as unhealthy.

However Davis (2009) declared the added importance of the wider definition of health stating “There is a biomedical component to health, but it exists in a setting that includes biological, personal, relational, social, and political factors”

Looking at health in a little more detail the determinants of health are defined by the WHO (2010) as

“Many factors combine together to affect the health of individuals and communities. Whether people are healthy or not, is determined by their circumstances and environment. To a large extent, factors such as where we live, the state of our environment, genetics, our income and education level, and our relationships with friends and family all have considerable impacts on health, whereas the more commonly considered factors such as access and use of health care services often have less of an impact.”

The determinants of health include:

the social and economic environment,