Women, Disability and Mental Distress

Julia L.T. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409454007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134777860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

Over recent decades an increasing amount of attention has been paid to identifying and meeting the individual support needs of mental health service users and people with physical impairments in the UK. Evidence of this can be seen within the literature that considers mental health and physical impairment from a wide range of perspectives, as well as the increased range of service provision for individuals within both categories. However, the support needs of individuals who fall into both categories have largely been overlooked by social care and health service providers, practitioners, and organisations for whom the main focus is either mental health or physical impairment. The lack of attention that has been given in theory and in practice to the mental health support needs of disabled women who experience mental distress has resulted in an insufficient knowledge base of how to support disabled women who may require some form of mental health support. For this group of women this has meant that their needs have arguably continued to be neglected and subsequently left unmet. Writing from her position as both a social worker and a service user, Julia Smith has written an innovative and important text which both discusses a neglected area of personal experience and makes an original contribution to knowledge with regard to both policy and practice.

Index

• able-bodied people, attitudes of 16–21, 22–3
• access, structural
  • Disability Discrimination Act 110–13
  • improvements in 21
  • and making friends 28
  • and mental health services 36–8, 130
  • positive impact of 63
  • service locations 116–17
  • training of disabled counsellors 87
  • well-being, impact on 113
• acquired impairment
  • counselling services, access to 43
  • family relationships 25–6
  • friends, reactions of 28–9
  • and loss 67–8
  • personal and individual, experiences as 14–15
  • personal relationships 32–3
  • physical impairment as cause of mental distress 128
• aims for book 3–4, 127, 139
• Anderson, A. 65
• anniversaries 68
• assumptions underpinning literature 10–11
• attitudes towards physical impairment
  • internalised oppression due to 21–2
  • of non-disabled people 16–21
  • and self-image 22–3
  • visible/non-visible impairment 17–19
• author’s background 2

• background of author 2
• Barnes, C. 111
• behavioural approaches to counselling 55, 74–5
• benefit finding 65–6
• bereavement 95
• Berger, R. 62
• Bochley, P. 93
• Brearley, G. 93
• buildings, access to. see structural access
• Burstow, B. 57

• care packages 131–2
• causal link between mental distress and physical impairment
  • in literature 10–11
  • women’s views on 13, 128–9
• charities 115–16
• children, feeling unable to support 97–8
• cognitive counselling 72–5
• comm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Living with a Physical Impairment: Is Mental Distress Inevitable?
• Accessing and Using Mental Health Services
• Counselling, Disabled People and Loss
• Gender, Disability and Mental Health
• Future Mental Health Provision: A Need for Change?
• Looking to the Future
• References
• Index