Chapter 1
Rituals intended to drive out spirits believed to possess a person; historically used when mental illness was attributed to supernatural causes.
Demonic exorcisms
Medications used to treat mental health symptoms and disorders, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and antianxiety medications.
Psychotherapeutic drugs
Categories that group hospital cases with similar clinical characteristics and expected resource needs, used to help determine hospital reimbursement.
Diagnosis-related groups (DRGs)
Supporting and protecting a person’s rights, needs, and choices and helping them obtain appropriate care and services.
Advocacy
Seeking advice or specialized knowledge from another professional to improve assessment, treatment, or care planning.
Consultation
A condition involving significant disturbances in thinking, emotional regulation, or behavior that cause distress or interfere with functioning.
Mental illness (disorder)
A defined geographic region whose residents are served by a particular health care facility or community mental health program.
Catchment area
A historical surgical procedure that cut or disrupted connections involving the brain’s frontal lobes to treat mental illness, often causing serious and permanent impairments.
Lobotomy
In this mental health context, repeated return to inpatient treatment or hospitalization after discharge, often following a recurrence of symptoms.
Recidivism
The condition of lacking a fixed, regular, and adequate place to live, including living in shelters or places not intended for habitation.
Homelessness
A model that views health as a changing range from high-level wellness to severe illness, rather than simply being healthy or sick.
Health-illness continuum
An ancient theory that health depended on a balance of four body fluids—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—and that imbalance caused illness.
Humoral theory of disease
A theory and form of therapy developed by Sigmund Freud that explores unconscious thoughts, conflicts, and early experiences to understand present feelings and behavior.
Psychoanalysis
Local facilities that provide mental health services, such as assessment, counseling, medication management, and crisis care, to people in the community.
Community mental health centers
Connecting a person with needed services and supports, such as treatment, housing, transportation, financial assistance, or employment programs.
Resource linkage
The shift from long-term care in psychiatric institutions to treatment and support in community settings.
Deinstitutionalization
Emotional, psychological, and social well-being that supports coping with stress, functioning in daily life, and maintaining relationships.
Mental health
A treatment that uses a brief electrical stimulus to produce a controlled seizure while the patient is under anesthesia, often to treat severe depression or certain other serious mental disorders.
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)
Mental health treatment provided while a person stays in a hospital or psychiatric unit, with around-the-clock care, supervision, and support.
Inpatient psychiatric care
An approach that combines treatment, rehabilitation, and practical supports—such as housing, employment assistance, and social support—to help people with serious mental illness live in the community.
Community support systems (CSS) model
An outdated term for mental illness, historically associated with the belief that the moon influenced mental disturbances.
Lunacy
Making an opening in the skull; historically performed for various reasons, including the belief that it could release spirits thought to cause mental illness.
Trephining
A coordinated process of assessing needs, planning care, connecting a person with services, and monitoring those services over time.
Case management
Immediate, short-term assistance to help a person manage an overwhelming situation, maintain safety, and regain effective coping and functioning.
Crisis intervention
Mental health treatment received through appointments or programs without an overnight hospital stay.
Outpatient mental health care
Services that help people with mental illness develop skills and obtain support for daily living, relationships, education, employment, and community participation.
Psychosocial rehabilitation
Professionals from different fields—such as nursing, psychiatry, psychology, social work, and occupational therapy—who work together to address a person’s needs.
Multidisciplinary mental health care team