What is the two-way connection between poverty and mental illness? Why does it occur?
- People who live in poverty are at increased risk of mental illness compared to those who are economically stable because of stressful lives, difficult childhoods, more ACE
- People with mental illness are at increased risk of becoming poor or staying po
What is the best way to break this connection, according to studies in developing countries?
- Evidence suggests that interrupting the cycle of poverty and mental illness should start with mental health care
- Intervention programs aimed at improving the mental health of people living in poverty found clear improvements in the rate and duration o
Describe the relationship between mental health and socioeconomic status.
- growing up in poverty is a risk factor for physical and mental health problems
- Significant problems have been documented at both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum
- No one is immune to mental health problems, but low-income individuals are still disp
How do levels of anxiety, depression, and substance use differ between teenagers from low-income vs. high-income families?
- high income high schoolers were more likely to experience anxiety and depression and use drugs/alcohol than low income students
- high income middle schoolers, no disturbances until 7th grade when girls were more depressed and boys began drinking
- amon
What explains the above results?
Privileged youth may be troubles because of:
- academic pressure: High depression, anxiety, and substance use was associated with perfectionist strivings and having parents who emphasized accomplishments over personal character
- isolation from adults:
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Why do students from high SES families appear to be at more risk for mental health problems today than their counterparts in the past?
Upper-class parents are more reluctant to seek help or get help because of:
- Embarrassment, privacy concerns, schadenfreude
- Feeling of needing to "maintain the veneer of well-being"
- School psychologists are less likely to intervene, for fear of backl
How does the proportion of the population imprisoned in the US differ from that of other nations?
- The U.S. has more prisoners than other countries
-
How have incarceration rates changed over time?
- incarceration rates have increased overtime (especially after the 1980s)
Social scientists have recently begun modeling incarceration using infectious disease models. What are the mechanisms by which incarceration can "spread" in a community?
Epidemiological models have been constructed to model the spread of mass incarceration through the population
? Young, minority men are the most susceptible ? Poor, urban neighborhoods are the hardest hit ? In some communities, the infection rate is up to
What are some of the unintended effects of incarceration on families?
- Afflicted individuals are socially marginalized
- Inability to find stable employment or housing
- Children growing up in affected families have shortened life expectancies and are 6-7 times more likely to be infected than children in unaffected familie
What evidence do scholars such as Christopher Barnes and Christopher Drake cite to back up the claim that the US is facing a public health crisis due to lack of sleep?
- The CDC recommends at least 10 hours of sleep per night for school-age children and 7-8 hours per night for adults
- Reports show that only 31% of high school students report at least 8 hours of sleep and nearly 30% of adults report an average of 6 hour
What policies do they recommend to address this problem?
- Establish national standards for middle and high school start times that are later in the day
- Stronger regulation of work hours and schedules
- End daylight saving time policy
- Improve education about sleep habits
- Improve access to treatment for sl
What are some downstream approaches to solving the problems associated with lack of sleep?
- Burnout: The Enemy of Sleep describes what individuals can do to get more sleep
- sleep 7-8 hours/night
- turns off all devices before bed and keep them out of the bedroom
- Start by getting 30 minutes more sleep
- Have a "thrive buddy" who can help tal
What can be gained from downstream approaches to solving sleep problems? What remains unsolved?
- allows an individual to directly change their habits which can impact themselves and others around them
- what is lacking is addressing the problem on the large scale that it is on
- policies need to be in place to help those who are at risk and are for
What do social scientists mean when they say that aging is new?
- Relatively few people in human history experienced this process
- Until the past couple hundred years or so, the average lifespan of humans beings was around 30 years
- Today, the average life span in developed countries is nearly 80 years
- Historicall
What are some of the social implications of this new phenomenon of aging?
- The rise of medical interventions
- Old age decline
- We cling to the idea of retirement at age 65, which was reasonable when individuals over 65 were a tiny sliver of the population
- We are not planning for old age
? People are not putting aside savin
Explain what is meant by the "rectangularization" of survival.
- The result of fewer deaths at younger ages has been the "rectangularization" of survival
- For most of human history, the population formed a pyramid
- In 30 years, we will have the same number of people under 5 as over 80
What are the benefits of providing geriatric specialty care to the elderly population? Why are there too few geriatricians?
- Good medical care can influence which direction a person's old age will take.
- the last years of their life are better; more comfortable
- The lack of geriatric and primary care specialists is due in part to compensation - these fields are among the lo
What often happens to well-being as individuals begin to enter middle age? As they begin to exit middle age?
- midlife crisis
- There is a slump in happiness around age 40
- Happiness starts to climb again around age 50
- emerges in response to questions about life satisfaction, not mood from moment to moment
- Is this all there is? (Mid 40s)
- Actually, this is
Explain socioemotional selectivity theory. How does it explain the greater sense of well-being often reported in old age?
- the idea is that as time horizons shrink, as they do with age, people become more selective about investing resources in emotionally meaningful relationships, goals, and activities
- Younger people tend to engage in knowledge-oriented and future-oriente
Demographic transition review: how have birth rates and death rates in modern, industrialized countries changed over the past several hundred years?
- preindustrial: high fertility and high mortality rates
- transition: high fertility, low mortality
- industrial: low fertility, low mortality
What is palliative care?
- a specialization that focuses on providing relief from pain and other symptoms from serious illness with the goal of improving quality of life
Why does a "good death" elude too many people?
- Doctors are trained to diagnose and treat disease, they have less preparation about how to handle situations when medicine is not going to cure disease
- Patients are also frequently not prepared for this situation
- Doctors struggle with when and how t
In what ways is death medicalized?
- unlike back in the day, most deaths occur in hospitals now
- there are intense care procedures, medical workers, costly bills, etc
- health professionals to feel obligated to continue aggressive medical treatment even though they do not wish to prolong
What is medicalization?
- the process by which human conditions and problems come to be defined and treated as medical conditions, and thus become the subject of medical study, diagnosis, prevention, or treatment.
- the process of taking a human experience or condition and defin
What are some of the positive consequences of medicalization?
- alleviates pain/discomfort
- gives people more time
- improved quality of life and longer lifespans
- Better understanding of mental health problems including depression, anxiety, PTSD, Tourette Syndrome, etc. along with physical illnesses like asthma,
What are some of the negative consequences of medicalization?
- health professionals to feel obligated to continue aggressive medical treatment even though they do not wish to prolong the dying process
- costly
- We are prolonging people's lives, and delaying death, but we can't save lives on any sort of permanent b
How does the pharmaceutical industry contribute to medicalization?
- has long been involved in promoting products to treat ills
- Marketing diseases and then selling a solution for them is now common practice
- industry is a major player in aggressively promoting its wares to physicians and directly to consumers
- Consum
What are the three engines driving medicalization, according to Peter Conrad? Explain how each one works.
- Biotechnology: the exploitation of biological processes for industrial and other purposes, especially the genetic manipulation of microorganisms for the production of antibiotics, hormones, etc.
- genomic medicine
- Genetic and epigenetic therapies
- Co
Do you believe American society is currently over-medicalized? Why or why not?
- medicalization can be a good thing, but it often leads to unnecessary interventions that can result to more problems