The Essay On Social And Cultural Diversity In Mental Health And Wellness.

Write a paper on 'The Social and Cultural Diversity'. The Paper requires the student to identify and reflect on possible personal biases regarding gender, religion, sexual or gender orientation, race, socioeconomic status, disability status, or culture. The purpose of this paper is to raise the students personal and professional level of awareness regarding the subject of diverse populations. five scholarly references or more required.

Analyze the legal, ethical, and community standards within the mental health and wellness field.

Propose strategies to promote self-care and wellbeing for mental health and wellness providers.

Analyze how culture impacts an individuals ability to recover, sense of belonging, connectivity, and wellbeing.

Assess personal competency to work with people with different backgrounds, belief systems, and worldviews.

Mental health and Wellness

Mental health is an important domain in the healthcare system. The principal pillar of the mental health services is proper engagement between the patient and the practitioner. However, biological interventions, psychological treatments, empathy, and proper understanding of the expert about the "diseased condition" are important for successful outcomes (Elliott, Huizinga & Menard, 2012).

Nurses or the healthcare practitioner must work in accordance with the prevalent nursing standards via following the legal and ethical requirement. Nurses are also responsible for the generation and management of information. Here information means documents related to health records. They are also required to perform with professionalism and integrity. Thus, the information recorded against the any mental health patients must be non-judgmental and relevant to mental healthcare and treatment of the person receiving the mental health service (Szmukler, Daw & Callard, 2014). Moreover, the patient’s information must be kept confidential, these encompass all type of data including clinical, and research and holds true irrespective of the medium in which in has been documented.

The mental health care practitioner must give value to quality nursing to all people, irrespective to cast, gender and financial background. Mental health nurses are required to value respect and kindness for self and for the patients. Here the value means moral worth, dignity of oneself along with respecting the individual ethical values that the people or mental health patients might nurture in the context of health care. Another important ethical aspect of mental health nursing is, nurses are required to value the diversity of the people along with informed decision-making. Here informed decision-making means valuing the legal and the moral rights of the people, including the children while assisting them in to determine the best possible care (Robson et al., 2013).

Moreover, in order to remain on the upper side of the ethical parameter, a mental health provide must consider several branches of ethical principles while delivering care. Three main branches of the ethical principle in mental health care include beneficence, non-maleficience and autonomy (Grace, 2017).

The mental health practitioner needs to critically consider the social and the cultural diversity of its consumers while addressing their mental health needs. There are diverse group of people residing in United States. The indigenous people are culturally and linguistically diverse with different religious and spiritual beliefs along with intellectual disability and poor socio-economic status. A mental health care practitioner needs to address the issues associated with bias, prejudice and discrimination while caring for this people (Long, 2012). Planning and proper implementation of the mental health service will depend on the evaluation of cultural differences and the cultural values of the aboriginal community.

Legal standards

  Work related stress causes emotional exhaustion, depolarization or complete loss of empathy and decrease in the sense of accomplishment. However, in order to promote quality care to the mental health patients, a mental health care practitioner must remain on the high side of energy level, full with compassion and empathy (Puig et al., 2012). So in order prevent burn out and compassion fatigue, mental health and wellness providers must practice self-care. To preach self-care there must be proper training among the mental health and wellness providers. This training will help them to fight against stress via handling the situation effectively. Other strategies include, strong workplace environment, reduction in workload and high patient to nurse ratio (Puig et al., 2012).

Culture of a patient or the consumer of the mental health care services has huge impact on several aspects of mental health and wellbeing and this is driven by the sense of belonging, connectivity and individual ability to recover. General perception about the cultural characteristics of a given aboriginal race can invite stereotyping of individuals. This stereotyping is based on appearance of that person or affiliation (Panter-Brick & Eggerman, 2012). In United States, there lies a step inequality in health among originals and indigenous people. Culture has a huge impact on an individual’s ability to recover. For example in aboriginal people, live in rented housing with restricted surface area and over crowing of people. It is their culture to live together and to visit their far or extended family members during any occasion round the year. This frequent or constant overcrowding of people hampers the equilibrium of the mental health and well-being. Moreover, healthy food habits is an important determinant of mental health and well being but the aboriginal people do not have the culture of observing a healthy diet and thus creating barrier towards a mental health well being (Fazel et al., 2012). Not only the aboriginal, the young crowd of US prefers to live a life full of intoxication including over-consumption of alcohol and smoking and this unhealthy lifestyle as imposed via the urban culture affect their mental health equilibrium (Elliott, Huizinga & Menard, 2012). Moreover, culture also affects the nature of the treatment and thus further delaying the process of mental well being. Sense of belonging is a unique phenomenon on mental health nursing. Sense of belonging is the basic human need. It is defined as a sense of personal involvement into a social system (Museus & Maramba, 2011). Such involvements make a person to feel an integral part of the system. Moreover, the sense belongings also specify recognition and acceptance. The majority of the population of US suffers from insecurity and this insecurity may come from love life, professional life or academic life. Such insecurities are also influenced by the culture, like in the US culture, people need to be professionally successful and this constant pressure creates a sense of insecurity, affecting the sense of belonging and that affects the mental well being (Jorm, 2012). The cultural thoughts also promote a sense of connectivity among the people and affecting the mental health and well being.

While working as a mental health practitioner and serving people from different cultural backgrounds the first thing, which I will try to, keep in mind is, providing respect to their dignity. Respecting their dignity, their cultural thoughts and values will help me to access their mental complications and resolve them accordingly via establishing a friendly relationship with them (Muntean, Tomita & Ungureanu, 2013). Other personal competency, which I think, is effective or I will work on while working with different background people are communication skills and proper demonstration of sensitivity.

References

Elliott, D. S., Huizinga, D., & Menard, S. (2012). Multiple problem youth: Delinquency, substance use, and mental health problems. Springer Science & Business Media. 42(7), 171-175.

Fazel, M., Reed, R. V., Panter-Brick, C., & Stein, A. (2012). Mental health of displaced and refugee children resettled in high-income countries: risk and protective factors. The Lancet, 379(9812), 266-282.

Grace, P. J. (2017). Nursing ethics and professional responsibility in advanced practice. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Jorm, A. F. (2012). Mental health literacy: empowering the community to take action for better mental health. American Psychologist, 67(3), 231.

Long, T. B. (2012). Overview of teaching strategies for cultural competence in nursing students. Journal of cultural diversity, 19(3), 102.

Muntean, A., Tomita, M., & Ungureanu, R. (2013). The Role of the Community Nurse in Promoting Health and Human Dignity-Narrative Review Article. Iranian journal of public health, 42(10), 1077.

Museus, S. D., & Maramba, D. C. (2011). The impact of culture on Filipino American students' sense of belonging. The Review of Higher Education, 34(2), 231-258.

Panter-Brick, C., & Eggerman, M. (2012). Understanding culture, resilience, and mental health: The production of hope. In The social ecology of resilience (pp. 369-386). Springer New York.

Puig, A., Baggs, A., Mixon, K., Park, Y. M., Kim, B. Y., & Lee, S. M. (2012). Relationship between job burnout and personal wellness in mental health professionals. Journal of Employment Counseling, 49(3), 98-109.

Robson, D., Haddad, M., Gray, R., & Gournay, K. (2013). Mental health nursing and physical health care: A cross?sectional study of nurses' attitudes, practice, and perceived training needs for the physical health care of people with severe mental illness. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 22(5), 409-417.

Szmukler, G., Daw, R., & Callard, F. (2014). Mental health law and the UN Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. International journal of law and psychiatry, 37(3), 245-252.