Mental health has been viewed as something to be ashamed of, something to be scared of, for centuries and it is about time that stops and people stop fearing it and instead embracing its meaning and helping people who are experiencing it to overcome their hardships, that are often caused by social factors such as poverty (Newnes and Holmes, 1999). According to Newnes and Holmes (1999), there has been a large problem with psychiatry and the way that it helps in the stigmatisation of mental health. However, after reading This is Madness, I have realised that this has been a problem within mental health services for many years, often a result of people having experienced challenges that are out of their control (Holmes and Dunn, 1999).
One example of an influencing fact on the mental health of individuals is that of social inequalities outlined by Williams (1999). According to the chapter by Williams (1999), mental health services often fail to take social inequalities, these are things like a person's gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation as well as disabilities, into account. This is often the case when the mental health services are providing people with care, this can have a detrimental effect as the individual can feel as though they are thrown into the same category as everyone else with little consideration for their greater needs (Williams, 1999).
According to Patal and Fatimilehin (1999) people from ethnic minority groups in Britain were often given lower paid jobs and were often discredited for their qualifications as a result of their ethnicity. This could therefore have played a key role in the reason as to why people from ethnic minority groups face mental ill health as a result of the racism, they face on a day to day basis (Patal and Fatimilehin, 1999). People from ethic minority groups seemingly face hardship at 2 levels, not only the fact they experience racism but also experience social deprivation as a result of the racisms effects. This chapter links to that of Williams (1999) just on a more specific level.