Health Mental Resource

Efficiency and employee well being are more important than ever to the overall success of organizations. Emotions are key to understanding executive effectiveness, organizational change, and corporate ethics. Stress, burnout, depression, drug abuse, violence, and other mental health problems are costing businesses billions of dollars every year in lost productivity and costs of ineffective treatment. "Mental Health and Productivity in the Workplace" is a comprehensive and practical guide to identifying, understanding, preventing, and resolving individual and organizational mental health problems in the workplace. Originally published as "Mental Health in the Workplace "(Van Nostrand/Wiley, 1993), this completely revised, updated, and expanded edition represents the most current thinking in the field and contains contributions from an expert panel of organizational and occupational psychiatrists. With fifty percent more chapters, this new edition adds essential material on creating systems and cultures that encourage organizational productivity and employee mental health and on finding cost-effective, quality mental health care. The book focuses on problems that start "at the top" (executive dysfunction) as well as on the effects of organizational structure, office politics, chronic change, downsizing and employment uncertainty, office wide emotional crises, and aspects of organizational development. In addition, this helpful resource includes information about such basic issues as anxiety, stress, burnout, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and psychosis. Written for executive management, human resource, benefit, occupational medicine, and mental healthprofessionals, this indispensable handbook offers an emotionally informed guide to cost-effective implementation of policies for maximum productivity.

For hundreds of years, people diagnosed with mental illness were thought to be hopeless cases, destined to suffer inevitable deterioration. Beginning in the early 1990s, however, providers and policymakers in mental health systems came to promote recovery as their goal. But what does recovery truly mean? For example, to consumers of mental health services, it implies empowerment and greater resources dedicated to healing; to HMOs, it can suggest a means of cost savings when benefits cease upon recovery. This book considers "recovery" from multiple angles. Traditionally, Nora Jacobson notes, recovery was defined as symptom abatement or a return to a normal state of health, but as activists, mental health professionals, and policymakers sought to develop "recovery-oriented" systems, other meanings emerged. Jacobson's analysis describes the complexes of ideas that have defined recovery in various contexts over time. The first meaning, "recovery-as-evidence," involves the theories, statistics, therapies, legislation, and myriad other factors that constituted the first one hundred years of mental health services provision in the United States. "Recovery-as-experience" brought the voices of patients into the conversation, while "recovery-as-ideology" drew on both recovery-as-evidence and recovery-as-experience to rally support for specific approaches and service-delivery models. This in turn became the basis for "recovery-as-policy," which developed as assorted representative bodies, such as commissions and task forces, planned reforms of the mental health system. Finally, "recovery-as-politics" emerged as reformers confronted harsh economic realities and entrenched ideas about evidence,experience, and ideology. Throughout, Jacobson draws on her research in Wisconsin, a state with a long history of innovation in mental health services.