Social workers provide more mental health services than any other profession, yet recent biomedical trends in psychiatry appear to minimize the importance of their traditional concerns, which focus on the social environment that accompanies mental disorders and their treatment. This book calls attention to this emerging problem and challenges social workers and other health care professionals to be more skeptical about diagnosis, community treatment, evidence-based practice, psychotherapy, medications, and managed care.

Anyone who has ever had a job has probably experienced work-related stress at some point or another. For many workers, however, job-related stress is experienced every day and reaches more extreme levels. Four in ten American workers say that their jobs are “very” or “extremely” stressful. Job stress is recognized as an epidemic in the workplace, and its economic and health care costs are staggering: by some estimates over $ 1 billion per year in lost productivity, absenteeism and worker turnover, and at least that much in treating its health effects, ranging from anxiety and psychological depression to cardiovascular disease and hypertension. Why are so many American workers so stressed out by their jobs? Many psychologists say stress is the result of a mismatch between the characteristics of a job and the personality of the worker. Many management consultants propose reducing stress by “redesigning” jobs and developing better individual strategies for “coping” with their stress. But, these explanations are not the whole story. They don’t explain why some jobs and some occupations are more stressful than other jobs and occupations, regardless of the personalities and “coping strategies” of individual workers. Why do auto assembly line workers and air traffic controllers report more job stress than university professors, self-employed business owners, or corporate managers (yes, managers!)? The authors of Work and Mental Health in Social Context take a different approach to understanding the causes of job stress. Job stress is systematically created by the characteristics of the jobs themselves: by the workers’ occupation, the organizations in which they work, their placements in different labor markets, and by broader social, economic and institutional structures, processes and events. And disparities in job stress are systematically determined in much the same way as are other disparities in health, income, and mobility opportunities. In taking this approach, the authors draw on the observations and insights from a diverse field of sociological and economic theories and research. These go back to the nineteenth century writings of Marx, Weber and Durkheim on the relationship between work and well-being. They also include the more contemporary work in organizational sociology, structural labor market research from sociology and economics, research on unemployment and economic cycles, and research on institutional environments. This has allowed the authors to develop a unified framework that extends sociological models of income inequality and “status” attainment (or allocation) to the explanation of non-economic, health-related outcomes of work. Using a multi-level structural model, this timely and comprehensive volume explores what is stressful about work, and why; specifically address these and questions and more: -What characteristics of jobs are the most stressful; what characteristics reduce stress? -Why do work organizations structure some jobs to be highly stressful and some jobs to be much less stressful? Is work in a bureaucracy really more stressful? -How is occupational “status” occupational “power” and “authority” related to the stressfulness of work? -How does the “segmentation” of labor markets by occupation, industry, race, gender, and citizenship maintain disparities in job stress? - Why is unemployment stressful to workers who don’t lose their jobs? -How do public policies on employment status, collective bargaining, overtime affect job stress? -Is work in the current “Post (neo) Fordist” era of work more or less stressful than work during the “Fordist” era? In addition to providing a new way to understand the sociological causes of job stress and mental health, the model that the authors provide has broad applications to further study of this important area of research. This volume will be of key interest to sociologists and other researchers studying social stratification, public health, political economy, institutional and organizational theory.

Now in its Seventh Edition, this psychiatric and mental health nursing text covers both care of patients with psychiatric disorders and the psychosocial aspects of physiological disorders. Geared toward LPN/LVN students, the book's format reflects the nursing model and the shift of psychiatric nursing care from hospitals to community-based settings . New content includes care planning and psychotropic drug monitoring and the DSM-IV-TR. Other features include an increased emphasis on com munication, and a family and resource support list that includes selec ted Web resources. End-of-chapter review questions allow the reader to balance knowledge-based, analysis and application questions. The Anci llary package consists of a printed Instructor's Manual and Test Bank on disk.

While depression has been the subject of much research in the last decade, far too little attention has been paid to the influence of the social environment on depression and on mental health generally. This lack has become more conspicuous since the Canadian federal government began requiring that policy makers make social environment a primary consideration when designing new mental health programs.

Human Behavior and the Social Environment, Micro Level draws on a resilience model to explore the dynamics of human behavior across the life span. Biological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions are covered. Illustrations and vignettes from social work, psychology, literature, philosophy, and current events highlight the turning points in our lives. Critical thinking questions are provided. The result is an essential book that bridges theory and practice in accordance with the 2015 Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) standards.

Environmental health researchers have long used concepts like the neighborhood effect to assessing people’s exposure to environmental influences and the associated health impact. However, these are static notions that ignore people’s daily mobility at various spatial and temporal scales (e.g., daily travel, migratory movements, and movements over the life course) and the influence of neighborhood contexts outside their residential neighborhoods. Recent studies have started to incorporate human mobility, non-residential neighborhoods, and the temporality of exposures through collecting and using data from GPS, accelerometers, mobile phones, various types of sensors, and social media. Innovative approaches and methods have been developed. This Special Issue aims to showcase studies that use new approaches, methods, and data to examine the role of human mobility and non-residential contexts on human health behaviors and outcomes. It includes 21 articles that cover a wide range of topics, including individual exposure to air pollution, exposure and access to green spaces, spatial access to healthcare services, environmental influences on physical activity, food environmental and diet behavior, exposure to noise and its impact on mental health, and broader methodological issues such as the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP) and the neighborhood effect averaging problem (NEAP). This collection will be a valuable reference for scholars and students interested in recent advances in the concepts and methods in environmental health and health geography.

This new edition of Mental Health Social Work in Context continues to be an authoritative, evidence based introduction to an area of specialism chosen by many social work students. Grounded in the social models of mental health particularly relevant to qualifying social workers, but also familiarising students with social aspects of medical perspectives, this core text helps to prepare students for practice and to develop their knowledge around: promoting the social inclusion of people with mental health problems the changing context of multidisciplinary mental health services an integrated evidence base for practice working with people with mental health problems across the life course. In this new edition the author has reflected on the impact of the global recession and austerity policies, both on the mental health of the population but also the much sharper conditions and reduced services within which social workers are now operating. This fully updated 2nd edition is an essential textbook for all social work students taking undergraduate and postgraduate qualifying degrees, and will also be invaluable for practitioners undertaking post-qualifying awards in mental health social work.

This revision of a well-loved text continues to embrace the confluence of person, environment, and occupation in mental health as its organizing theoretical model, emphasizing the lived experience of mental illness and recovery. Rely on this groundbreaking text to guide you through an evidence-based approach to helping clients with mental health disorders on their recovery journey by participating in meaningful occupations. Understand the recovery process for all areas of their lives—physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental—and know how to manage co-occurring conditions.

This text explores the relationship between the planned or built environment and the occurrence of mental ill-health. It begins by providing a broad overview of what is known about the causes of psychopathic behaviour. It then goes on to discuss the issues that arise when attempting to identify: the impact of the environment as a source of stress; the effects that the environment can have on the quality of relationships between people; and the relationship between symbolic aspects of the environment, the planning process and mental health. The book uses analysis and case studies drawn from the UK and US and contains example illustrations of the built environment.