Religious institutions and the prevention of mental illness

It is estimated that fifteen percent of the population is in need of some kind of mental health service at any given time, thus constituting a primary health problem. The President's Commission on Mental Health (PCMH) recognized that religious institutions can help to prevent mental illness by providing support in the community. This paper presents types of programs the PCMH found that were supportive and describes the program of one church to illustrate additional ways that clergy and their congregants, working collaboratively with professionals and agencies, can contribute significantly to the prevention of mental illness.is in the private practice of clinical social work and an M.T.S. student at Wesley Theological Seminary.     

Differences in attributions of mental illness and social distance for portrayals of four mental disorders

For individuals with mental illness, others' perceptions of mental illness often limit integration into communities. Perceptions of mental illness manifest as social stigma in the form of social distance and may depend on individuals' attributions of the origins of mental illness. 180 university students completed a survey on attribution of mental illness and social distance across several disorders (psychiatric and physical). Participants indicated greater social distance for severe mental illness (i.e., schizophrenia) than less severe mental illness and physical illness. More desire for social distance may be related to unfamiliarity with severe mental illness rather than less severe mental and physical illnesses. Greater understanding of how individuals perceive mental illness can inform efforts to educate the public.     

The stigma of having a parent with mental illness: Genetic attributions and associative stigma

Children often report associative stigma because they are ‘contaminated’ by association with a parent who has a mental illness. An exploratory study was conducted to investigate the role of genetic attributions in the aetiology of associative stigma. The first hypothesis was that genetic attributions would predict associative stigma over and above the contribution of biochemical and stressful‐event attributions, while the second hypothesis was that the relationship between genetic attributions and associative stigma would be mediated by the perceived likelihood that children would develop the same disorder as their parents. Two‐hundred‐and‐two individuals were asked to read a hypothetical scenario describing a teenage girl whose mother had been diagnosed with either schizophrenia or depression. Both hypotheses were supported. The findings of the study have implications for a number of professions working in the community such as teachers and psychologists. Additional avenues for future research are also explored.     

Mental illness has multiple causes: beliefs on causes of mental illness by congregants of selected neo-prophetic churches in Ghana

ABSTRACT

The present study explored perceived causes of, and preferred treatment approach for, mental illness among congregants of six Neo-prophetic churches in Accra and Kumasi through in-depth interviews. Using thematic analysis, five themes emerged from participants’ causal attributions of mental illness. These included lifestyles and environmental stressors, spiritual causes, interaction of multiple factors, trauma and biological causes. Additionally, participants discussed four main mechanisms through which stress leads to mental illness. These included persistent worrying over stressors, use of inappropriate coping strategies to cope with stress, refusal to talk about one's problems and individuals’ appraisal of stress and available coping resources. These beliefs directly determined congregants’ preferred treatment approach. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Preschoolers' and adults' attributions of who causes interpersonal events

Adults and 4‐year‐olds explained who caused prosocial or antisocial interactions between two characters who differed in two dimensions that underlie interpersonal traits. Participants saw pictures depicting every pairwise combination of four characters (good/powerful, good/weak, bad/powerful or bad/weak) as initiators or recipients of six actions. Both children and adults made causal attributions to ‘good’ characters for prosocial behaviours and to ‘bad’ characters for antisocial behaviours. Potency influenced the frequency of attributions. Adults and children differed in the justifications of their attributions and in their reconciliations of contradictory information, e.g. a positive character initiating an antisocial act. Explanations of social events are based on characteristics of both interactants in combination with whether the event is prosocial or antisocial. The findings thus extend work on children's ‘theory‐of‐mind’ to the realm of interpersonal interactions, where beliefs, desires or dispositions of either of two characters can cause an event. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Religious conservatism-liberalism and mental health

Pastoral Psychology -     

Physical symptoms and illness attributions in agoraphobia and panic.

The cognitive model of panic disorder proposes that panic patients interpret physical symptoms in a catastrophic way, thus precipitating panic attacks. This study describes the development of a questionnaire measure designed to assess beliefs about the health implications of various symptoms. Two groups, agoraphobics and normals, were compared on a variety of measures. Agoraphobics showed much higher panic frequency, fear of anxiety, and prevalence of frightening cognitions when anxious, but did not score higher than normals when assessing seriousness of symptoms. The implications of these results are considered.     

Children's recognition of time in the causes and cures of physical and emotional reactions to illnesses and injuries

The present set of studies examined children's and college students' recognition of the role of time in the manifestation of causes and cures for illnesses and injuries. In Study 1, participants ranging from 4‐year‐olds through college students were presented with biological, moral, psychological, and irrelevant causes for illness symptoms and were asked how much time elapsed between the cause and the symptom. They were also asked if medicine would make the person feel better and if so how much time elapsed between taking the medicine and feeling better. Study 2 replicated Study 1 with 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds. Study 3 examined whether 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds and college students could differentiate between physical and emotional reactions to illnesses and injuries, with regard to time course. Overall, young children underestimate how long it takes for illness symptoms to emerge (expecting them to result right away following exposure to contamination). Nonetheless, children generated longer timelines for biological cures than biological causes. Moreover, 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds expect physical and emotional reactions to follow different time courses. These results suggest that young children have a nascent expectation that biological events are distinct from non‐biological events, in how they unfold over time.     

Bioethics and the marginalization of mental illness

This paper explores why ethical issues associated with mental illness have been generally neglected in the literature and texts of the discipline of bioethics. I argue that the reasons for this are both philosophical and structural, involving the philosophical framework of principlism in bioethics, in particular the privileging of the principle of autonomy, and the institutional location and disciplinary boundaries of bioethics as a profession. Other contributing factors include developments outside of bioethics, in medicine and law and in the delivery patterns and funding sources of mental health services, and above all the pervasive stigma that attaches to mental illness. My goal is to show both how the attention bioethics could bring would benefit this neglected area of health care, and why attending to the issues surrounding mental illness would benefit bioethics in meeting its professional obligations as the public voice on matters of ethical significance in health care.     

Agency attributions of mental effort during self-regulated learning

Previous results suggest that the monitoring of one’s own performance during self-regulated learning is mediated by self-agency attributions and that these attributions can be influenced by poststudy effort-framing instructions. These results pose a challenge to the study of issues of self-agency in metacognition when the objects of self-regulation are mental operations rather than motor actions that have observable outcomes. When participants studied items in Experiment 1 under time pressure, they invested greater study effort in the easier items in the list. However, the effects of effort framing were the same as when learners typically invest more study effort in the more difficult items: Judgments of learning (JOLs) decreased with effort when instructions biased the attribution of effort to nonagentic sources but increased when they biased attribution to agentic sources. However, the effects of effort framing were constrained by parameters of the study task: Interitem differences in difficulty constrained the attribution of effort to agentic regulation (Experiment 2) whereas interitem differences in the incentive for recall constrained the attribution of effort to nonagentic sources (Experiment 3). The results suggest that the regulation and attribution of effort during self-regulated learning occur within a module that is dissociated from the learner’s superordinate agenda but is sensitive to parameters of the task. A model specifies the stage at which effort framing affects the effort–JOL relationship by biasing the attribution of effort to agentic or nonagentic sources. The potentialities that exist in metacognition for the investigation of issues of self-agency are discussed.