Mental hygiene

Learn Mental Hygiene practices

1. Dr. Suresh Kumar Murugesan PhD Mental Hygiene

2. About the Course Teacher Dr.Suresh Kumar Murugesan is a passionate Professor, researcher and Mental Health Practitioner from Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India At present he is heading the department of Psychology, The American College, Madurai He is very keen in learning new research studies in behavioural Sciences and open to learn. His ultimate aim is to make impression in the field of Knowledge His area of specializations are Psychomentry, Psychotherapy, Positive Psychology, Education Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cyber Psychology etc WhatsApp [phone] email - [email protected]

3. Hygiene Hygiene is a series of practices performed to preserve health.

4. Hygiene According to the World Health Organization, "Hygiene refers to conditions and practices that help to maintain health and prevent the spread of diseases."

5. Personal hygiene Personal hygiene refers to maintaining the body's cleanliness.

6. Mental hygiene Mental hygiene is the practice of trying to maintain mental health through proactive behavior and treatment. Mental health is “one's overall psychological well-being.”

7. Mental hygiene Mental hygiene is what we do to keep our mind healthy.

8. M ental hygiene movement The founder of the mental hygiene movement, Clifford Whittingham Beers, wrote an autobiography in 1908 titled A Mind That Found Itself . It dealt frankly with his mental health struggles and called for reform in the field of mental health treatment.

9. Mental hygiene Practicing mental hygiene is an ongoing process. Understanding what it is and how to practice it can help improve our quality of life.

10. Mental hygiene Mental hygiene , the science of maintaining mental health and preventing the development of psychosis, neurosis, or other mental disorders.

11. Health WHO “health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” The term mental health represents a variety of human aspirations: rehabilitation of the mentally disturbed, prevention of mental disorder, reduction of tension in a stressful world, and attainment of a state of well-being in which the individual functions at a level consistent with his or her mental potential.

12. Mental hygiene Mental hygiene includes all measures taken to promote and to preserve mental health. Community mental health refers to the extent to which the organization and functioning of the community determines, or is conducive to, the mental health of its members.

13. O ptimum mental health As noted by the World Federation for Mental Health, the concept of optimum mental health refers not to an absolute or ideal state but to the best possible state insofar as circumstances are alterable. Mental health is regarded as a condition of the individual, relative to the capacities and social-environmental context of that person.

14. A very few year ago would have been difficult to justify the inclusion of the concept on mental hygiene in a general treatise on preventive medicine and hygiene.

15. The medico-legal term “insanity” was used to designate all abnormal mental states and the incorrect conception of mental and physical diseases as distinct and practically unrelated was widely accepted.

16. The misconceptions and the hopelessness, both as to cure and prevention, which characterized the medical attitude toward mental diseases combined to disassociate mental medicine and its problems from the subjects which were engaging the attention of physicians and sanitarians generally.

17. T he determination to prevent diseases which was beginning to dominate the medical profession would soon extend into the domain of mental medicine. Today, however, a treatise on the prevention of disease which failed to include a chapter on mental hygiene would neglect an important field of preventive medicine.

18. The realization that many forms of mental disease depend in a large measure upon preventable causes, the rapid growth of psychiatry and its acceptance as a department of scientific medicine, and the newly discovered opportunities for utilizing its resources in practical attempts to deal with social problems have broken down the barriers which so long and so effectually isolated mental medicine.

19. Why is mental hygiene important? Mental hygiene was first recorded in the English language in the 1840s, when it was used in the title of a book by William Sweetser, a medical doctor and professor. In the early 1900s, psychologist Clifford Wittingham Beers started a mental hygiene movement after experiencing mistreatment while at mental institutions for anxiety and depression. He championed improved treatment of people with mental disorders and increased awareness about mental illness—topics that are still relevant today.

20. Some common mental hygiene practices Many of the p racticed mental hygiene without even knowing it. Psychologists recommend strategies like being aware of emotional pain and managing (but not suppressing) negative feelings. Even simple self-care activities can be part of an effective mental hygiene routine: listening to calming or upbeat music, talking about feelings with friends or family, and keeping the mind busy by doing small tasks.

21. Mental Hygiene Sometimes mental hygiene is more formal, such as seeking the care of mental health professionals. The strategies can help to maintain mental health, which is the goal of mental hygiene . Importantly, practicing good mental hygiene can help us deal with psychological trauma, like the death of a loved one, a professional failure, or a romantic rejection.

22. Physical and Mental Hygiene Physical hygiene is part of our daily routine, and many mental health professionals are working to bring awareness to the role of mental hygiene in maintaining and improving mental health and preventing mental illness. The next time when wash the hands or brush the teeth, think about what it can do for our mental hygiene !

23. Mental hygiene Mental hygiene stresses the integration of the person —body, mind, environment. It draws where it will and can for its bases.

24. Mental Hygiene The World Health Organisation (WHO) itself makes it clear: "Mental health is an integral part of health; indeed, there is no health without mental health". Mental Hygiene practice included how to avoid negative behaviour, achieve emotional equilibrium and improve our quality of life.

25. Mental Hygiene The psychological repercussions of this health emergency have highlighted the necessity to maintain well-being through mental hygiene. This medical practice, initiated by the American psychiatrist Clifford Whittingham Beers back in 1909, defines the set of practices that allow a person to enjoy mental health and be in harmony with his or her socio-cultural surroundings. The behaviours that it covers are designed to prevent negative behaviour, provide emotional stability and improve quality of life.

26. Mental Health Good mental health enables us to learn, reason, interact, produce, face difficulties and put our best face on things, to quote a few examples. That's why the UN and WHO warn that its decline presents a grave social and economic problem: depression and anxiety alone produce annual losses of over $1bn at global level, whilst serious mental health issues reduce life expectancy by 10 to 20 years.

27. Need of mental Hygiene In these difficult times, mental hygiene is the key to protecting society's most vulnerable, such as the young. In most of the countries , one of the countries worst affected by COVID-19, 32 % of adolescents with underlying health problems have been adversely affected by the pandemic, and 31 % of Italian and Spanish parents say that their children feel more lonely due to the isolation measures. These figures should not be overlooked since suicide is the second leading cause of death worldwide in the 15-29 age group.

28. Need of mental Hygiene In a world with over 264 million people suffering depression and a pandemic threatening an explosion in the number of cases, as the UN warns in the report mentioned earlier, mental health has become a top priority for governments. The UN itself considers it imperative to urgently strengthen psychological care services in the face of alarming figures coming from countries like the US, where 45 % of the population have seen a deterioration in their emotional state due to the coronavirus, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).

29. Mental Hygiene movement Mental hygiene, the public-health perspective within psychiatry, was influential from 1910 until about 1960. Since World War II, mental hygiene ideas became increasingly incorporated into mainstream psychiatry, in particular through the community health movement of the 1960s. The mental hygiene, or mental health, movement thereafter ceased to exist as a separate movement.

30. Instead of focusing on the treatment of mental illness, mental hygienists emphasized early intervention, prevention, and the promotion of mental health.

31. M ental hygienists were interested in children because they were convinced that mental illness and mental disorder were to an important extent related to early childhood experiences.

32. Mental hygienists interest in prevention made them focus their public-health education activities on reaching parents to inform them about the latest scientific insights in child development and child rearing.

33. Mental hygienists also viewed the educational system as a suitable location for preventive activity and became involved in programs for teacher education and educational reform.

34. The Mental Hygiene Movement

35. Origins Of The Mental Hygiene Movement The National Committee for Mental Hygiene was founded in New York in 1909 by a number of leading psychiatrists and Clifford W. Beers (1876–1943), who had been institutionalized in several mental hospitals after a nervous breakdown. He described his experiences and the deplorable conditions in mental hospitals in his autobiography A Mind That Found Itself (1913).

36. Origins Of The Mental Hygiene Movement The National Committee aimed to improve conditions in mental hospitals, stimulate research in psychiatry, improve the quality of psychiatric education, develop measures preventing mental illness, and popularize psychiatric and psychological perspectives. Although mental hygiene originated within psychiatry, mental hygiene ideas also inspired social workers, teachers, psychologists, sociologists, and members of other professions. Consequently the mental hygiene movement became interdisciplinary in nature.

37. Origins Of The Mental Hygiene Movement During the 1920s, Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic ideas became increasingly influential in the United States. Psychoanalysis emphasized the importance of early childhood experiences and their impact on mental health later in life. Mental hygienists became convinced that preventive intervention was best directed at growing children and those individuals who had the most extensive contact with them: parents and teachers. Initially mental hygienists emphasized the importance of therapeutic intervention in the emotional problems of young children. They later also emphasized the importance of fostering mental health in all growing children.

38. Origins Of The Mental Hygiene Movement Starting in the 1920s, mental hygienists promoted a therapeutic perspective toward the everyday problems of children. The National Committee was instrumental in the establishment of child guidance clinics. Initially these clinics were associated with juvenile courts. They were modeled upon the clinic of William Healy (1869–1963), who had been the first director of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute in Chicago, which was associated with the juvenile court there. In 1917 he became the director of the Judge Baker Foundation in Boston.

39. Origins Of The Mental Hygiene Movement According to Healy, juvenile delinquents needed to be investigated individually by a team consisting of a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and a social worker in order to ascertain the child's abilities, home background, emotional life, motivations, and intelligence. On this basis an individualized treatment plan could be developed and implemented. During the 1930s child guidance clinics came to focus less on diagnosing and treating juvenile delinquents and more on the therapeutic treatment of the emotional problems of children from middle-class families. Child guidance clinics increasingly treated parents and children who came for help on their own initiative.

40. Origins Of The Mental Hygiene Movement During the 1920s academic research on children became increasingly respectable and well organized as a consequence of the funding provided by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, a large philanthropic organization that supported research in child development at several academic institutions. The aim was to investigate the development of normal children and to popularize the findings of this research. Inspired by this research, a number of leading mental hygienists argued that preventive activity should no longer be focused on detecting early signs of maladjustment but instead on tracing aberrations in normal child development. Consequently preventive activity was potentially directed at all children instead of only those children who were troublesome to parents and teachers. During the 1930s a few leading mental hygienists developed educational programs aimed at fostering mental health in schoolchildren.

41. Mental Hygiene And The Educational System Mental hygienists viewed the educational system as a promising venue for preventive activities because it could potentially reach all children. During the 1930s they successfully influenced teacher education programs to include developmental psychology. Initially they wanted to raise awareness among teachers about the ramifications of educational practices–particularly methods of maintaining control and punishment for transgressions–for mental health.

42. Mental Hygiene And The Educational System A number of educational reformers became interested in mental hygiene to provide a rationale for educational reform by claiming that the curriculum needed to be organized in conformity with insights in child development. In addition, many Progressive educators viewed the school as the place where children were trained for adjustment; they viewed the school as the preparation for life. The life adjustment movement in education claimed that the school should train the whole child and not just his or her intellect. Educational reformers criticized the traditional academic curriculum for its emphasis on mental discipline and rote learning, which they saw as irrelevant for most children. They advocated instead a variety of educational initiatives such as vocational training and project learning. The influence of these ideas on education was profound: the development of the personality became one of the central goals of education.

43. Mental Hygiene And The Educational System The influence of mental hygiene ideas after World War II was illustrated by the pervasive interest of parents, especially mothers, in child-rearing literature. Critics have argued that this literature made mothers unnecessarily worried about the well-being of their children, and the influence of mental hygiene ideas on education was countered at times by an emphasis on the teaching of basic academic skills. In the 1990s the influence of psychiatric and psychological ideas on educational practice has been criticized as one of the causes of educational decline in North America.

44. Mental Hygiene - Strategies When we think of proper hygiene, actions such as brushing our teeth and washing our hands probably come to mind. However, these practices only focus on physical hygiene. They do nothing to take care of our minds. In his book "The Time Bandit Solution: Recovering Stolen Time You Never Knew You Had," Edward G. Brown presents the concept of "mental hygiene," which focuses on caring for our mind the same way we do for our body. Just as physical hygiene keeps our body in top condition to move and function, taking care of our mental hygiene keeps our mind sharp. Brown designed the concept "for the purpose of increasing sustained behavioral peak performance through concentration." He focuses on strategies for ridding our mind of destructive, negative thoughts and filling it with positive affirmations and self-esteem boosters. Here are Brown's six techniques for taking care of our mental hygiene to keep our mind ready to tackle a challenge at any time:

45. 1. Transcend the environment To transcend the environment, we must mentally overcome any physical factors that we can't control, such as when the air conditioning goes out at work during a hot summer. Instead of focusing on the fact that we're sweaty and uncomfortable, distract ourselves with pleasant or innocuous thoughts, Brown says. It's like the old adage: mind over matter.

46. 2. Cultivate constructive acceptance Learn not only to accept the physical things we cannot change, but to accept them graciously , Brown advises. In high school, Brown dreamed of playing center in the NBA, but he was too short to excel at the position. Instead of compromising and playing forward or guard, he gave up on basketball. Years later, Brown realized he should have constructively accepted his handicap and found another way to pursue his NBA dreams instead of dropping them entirely.

47. 3. Visualize the ideal self Before taking on any task, from tackling a hefty to-do list to giving a company-wide presentation, visualize ourselves coming out successful. If we can picture our ideal outcome of a challenge, we can then inhabit that ideal self as an actually go through the challenge, explains Brown. "It means visualizing ourselves successful with all the goals we hope to achieve, despite challenges, conflicts, and adversity," he says. This visualizing technique shouldn't be saved just for big events - it should be part of your everyday mental hygiene routine, Brown adds.

48. 4. Use positive affirmation. Think of a phrase that gets motivated - for example, "You can do it" - and repeat it as it tell to self to think positive thoughts. Although it may feel silly at first, Brown warns, we'll eventually program our subconscious to associate the phrase with an uplifting feeling, motivating us to power through any situation. Brown has conditioned himself so that his phrase triggers an automatic adrenaline rush.

49. 5. Practice psychological counterpunching. Brown draws this technique from famed boxer Muhammed Ali, who said that, "A good counterpuncher will hit without being hit." To implement this psychologically, Brown suggests using a double dose of positive affirmations. When a negative thought comes to mind, such as "I'll never finish this on time," first block it by saying something like "Yes, I can," and then knock it away with a phrase such as "Just do it."

50. 6. Change your internal computer chip Like computer memory chips, our minds become programmed to constantly think certain things, Brown says. So in order to change a negative behavior, we must replace it with a positive one. Instead of simply telling yourself to stop doing something, concentrate on the habit we'd like to replace it with and stick with it. "We must do the same thing every time we lose focus so that our new memory chip will allow us to relax," Brown says.

51. References https://www.dictionary.com/browse/mental-hygiene https://www.britannica.com/science/mental-hygiene https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1586143/ https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/283490 https://www.iberdrola.com/talent/mental-hygiene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health https://dictionary.apa.org/mental-hygiene https://www.businessinsider.in/strategy/6-Ways-To-Take-Care-Of-Your-Mental-Hygiene/articleshow/39192204.cms https://www.encyclopedia.com/medicine/psychology/psychology-and-psychiatry/mental-hygiene\