Insurance -Mental Health

The growth of forensic psychiatry may be due to changes in the laws and to a more liberal acceptance of psychiatric explanations of behaviour, but a more immediate reason is the large number of mental health issues occurring in many workplaces. That is why the link between the mental health system may, therefore, be at the root of the growing importance of forensic psychiatry.

One reason that has been most commonly advanced to explain the large number of work care issues surfacing in the the workplace. In general, its important for organisations to resettle employees back into the workforce where possible, providing short admissions to general hospital psychiatric units, outpatient treatment options, psycho-social rehabilitation, alternative opportunities and other  services. Sometimes, however, these decisions did not respond to any planning, or any assessment of the needs of those employees that were going to be resettled. Decisions, therefore, were mostly made on rhetorical and historic beliefs, rather than on proper scientific reasoning.

On the other hand, de-institutionalisation has also been credited with a host of negative effects. Legally, along with legal activism, de-institutionalisation has been blamed for giving impulse to litigation and costly over-legalisation and over-regulation of psychiatric practice. Socially, a series of pernicious effects have impacted directly on the fate of the mentally ill in the community. These have included reports of “revolving door patients” (those patients in need of repeated and frequent admissions), and the rise among the homeless populations in that at least 30% among them are chronically mentally ill persons. Even when housing is available, it is often in rundown tenements in inner cities or psychiatric ghettos of large urban centres, where dispossessed and confused mental patients walk about in a daze talking to themselves, and where they are easy victims of robbery, rape, abuse, and physical violence. Some simply die of exposure in the streets in frigid winter nights. De-institutionalisation has also been blamed for the criminalisation and the transmigration of mental patients from the mental health system to the justice/ correctional system and for violent behaviour displayed by some mental patients in the community.