TITLE: CONSIDER KEY ISSUES OF CULTURAL AND GENDER DIFFERENCES, CARE AND CONTROL, SOCIAL PROVISION THAT CHARACTERISE SOCIAL WORK IN THE FOLLOWING CONTEXT:

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Mental Health

Definition of Mental Health

"A term used by doctors and other health professionals to describe clinically recognizable patterns of psychological symptoms or behaviour causing acute or chronic ill-health, personal distress or distress to others"

World Health Organisation 1992

ICD-10 Classifications

Cultural and gender differences

There is quite a large distinction as Cultural and gender differences have a great effect on Mental health. This could basically be anything for example the Britain of today has many people with different cultures and different background.

Most of what is summarised in this piece of work concentrates mainly with Racism and Mental Health.

DEFINING RACISM

Central to understanding the steps towards promoting the principles of Anti-Racist social work in mental health, clarification of the central concept of racism is necessary. Chakrabarti (1990) defines racism as: first a set of beliefs or a way of thinking within which groups, identified on the basis of real or imagined biological characteristics (skin colour, for example) are thought necessarily to possess other characteristics that are viewed in a negative light.

It is rooted in the belief that certain groups identified as 'races', ethnic minorities or by some more abusive label, share characteristics such as attitudes or abilities and a propensity to certain behaviour (Bowser 1995)

visible the symptoms, the greater the chance of labeling.

There have been suggestions that the culture of black people makes them more susceptible to being identified by lay people and the police. Holding the individual's culture responsible for what resides in the racism of others, in this way, has been described as 'victim-blaming'. The crux of this type of argument is that black people express their distress in a culturally idiosyncratic way (Littlewood and Lipsedge 1982). It has been suggested, for example, that the manifestation of 'mental illness' predisposes Afro-Caribbeans towards...