Mental Illness Case Scenarios

Mental illnesses are conditions that affect a person’s thinking, emotions, and their functioning capabilities on a daily basis. “In the United States, more than 37 million people are known to experience a mental condition in a year’s time. Next to cardiovascular diseases mental illnesses are the second leading cause of disability and premature death.” (Litin, 2009.) Many mental illnesses have a strong genetic basis, but there are many other factors that can make a person vulnerable to developing a cognitive impairment. Some of these factors include, stress, grief or loss of a loved one, past trauma experience, and physical illnesses have been linked to the development of mental disorders. A person’s coping methods during earlier years can adversely

Some of the circumstances that can affect a client’s treatment could be lack of knowledge by the professional and the unwillingness to admit limits to one’s own personal expertise. The professional will work with a wide array of clients from different genders, ethnicities, and sexual orientation, thus being culturally competent is a must in this line of work. The practioner must be able to see the client as an individual, demonstrate self-awareness, and advocate for all clients. Case manager’s are working directly with their clients therefore it is critical for them to be able to show skills of rapport- building to hopefully break down barriers and negative attitudes from the clients. Some of the barriers that are not in the case manager’s control would be the amount of funds that are available to the practioner to aid the clients. Many of the programs put into place through the state are funded on a year-to-year basis and are only allowed a certain number of dividends and the resources that are available to the case managers are not always available or willing to help clients in particular

This may also prove to be the case on being able to provide certain medications to the child if their insurance is not willing to cover the treatment. The lack of mental health facilities available to clients and or the requirements being unattainable for many families are also a big concern for these families. Case managers have the opportunity to engage their clients for longer periods of time which helps their outcomes, but with limited resources, they can run into a terrible cycle of only being able to mask the problems for their clients and lack the ability to provide any long term solutions to these families.

Bias in Mental Health
For centuries, the mental health field has encountered a significant amount of negative attitudes towards people faced with cognitive impairments. Some forms of prejudices that these people encounter are, prejudices from service providers on the client’s medications, an idea that the client is incapable of learning or achieving desirable results, false perceptions in the media that mental health problems lead to a more violent person, and sometimes the clients are not validated but instead are accused of making the disorders up for attention.

Changes in the