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Families Have Tended To Keep Their Mentally Ill Hidden And Concealed From The ...

Families have tended to keep their mentally ill hidden and concealed from the world, preferring to lock them away in cloistered and dark recesses, rather than in exposing them to public scrutiny. The medical fraternity on its part has been content, for centuries, to send mentally challenged persons to inadequately managed and crowded asylums, forcing them to live in conditions of horrifying indignity and danger, often at the receiving end of treatment worse than that given to hardened criminals. Family members, grateful to be relieved from their onerous and trying responsibilities, have not hesitated to enter into pacts with the state and the medical profession to condemn these unfortunate Cinderellas to life long imprisonment, neglect and unimaginable misery.
Advances in medical science, during the course of the twentieth century, have led to astonishing improvements in physical health and longevity, especially among the peoples of the advanced nations. Most diseases are under control, and the ones that still occur belong either to the miniscule tribe of ailments, for which cures have not been found, or relate to lifestyle issues like stress, obesity, diabetes, hypertension and cardiac ailments. The median age of the population has risen sharply, bringing with it a host of related concerns. Recent years have seen an increased focus on mental health problems in the UK. While this greater concern with mental health may well be due to the elimination of over riding, and life threatening physical infections and ailments, these problems do represent one of the most widespread and serious challenges facing the British medical fraternity and society today.
Mental health problems, while they continue to afflict millions of people in everyday life, create far greater havoc in the lives of the thousands of prisoners who live in British jails, and their occurrence and increase have now become a matter of national concern. Prisoners suffer much more from these illnesses than free citizens, and, ironically, receive significantly inferior treatment than those who live in normal society. This vexing and extremely unjust state of affairs, has attracted, in the past decade, the attention of politicians, peers, social scientists and lawmakers, and, in turn, led to a number of investigative studies, as well as to measures specifically formulated to alleviate the situation. My dissertation aims to delve into the conditions of prisoners suffering from mental health problems, determine the extent and efficacy of the medical facilities and treatment available to them, and arrive at conclusions on the actual state of affairs, as well as what more can be done to alleviate the situation.
b. Definition of Problem
Mental health issues constitute one of the major challenges facing the medical systems of advanced countries.

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