Mental Health and Its Effects

In this report I will be writing on Mental health and its effects on people but a main focus will be on the public services as they experience huge amounts of stress on a day to day bases with that only being at their jobs, this report is being written on behalf of MIND an organisation for Mental Health. The link between mental and physical health is very clear to see in some cases, as people with high levels of stress compared to that of people with fairly lower levels are more likely to have died from cancer and they have also found a link where depression was found to be associated with an increased risk of developing coronary heart disease.

(Mental Health Foundation, 2018) As well as that there are plenty of lifestyle factors that can affect your mental health both positively and negatively a few examples of this would be:

Exercising in any shape or form is a great way to keep you mentally and physically healthy, there has been research conducted that exercising increases the amount of feel good chemicals which there are 4 main one which are Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins, when these are released into your body it will give you a sense of happiness and feeling good,(Mental Health Foundation, 2018) the way this could help improve the effectiveness of emergency response well to start off connecting with people is a great way to share your positive experiences and if necessary be able to talk about the problems you may be facing and just to get things “off of your chest” and it could also allow you to support others, this would help improve effectiveness in the way that if you took even a little bit of your time and spent it with family or friends etc it would help combat you getting overwhelmed by all of the stress of work and life and help you keep a clear head.

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(NHS Choices, 2019)

A negative lifestyle factor would be smoking, often people with mental health issues will say that smoking often relieves them from their problems but contrary to that the relief is only for a short time and the trade-offs for that short term relief is increased problems in the lungs and throat, while also disrupting dopamine levels as the nicotine in cigarettes interferes with the chemicals in our bodies, meaning that the body will struggle to produce dopamine in the long term and cause increased addiction to nicotine and thus more chance of developing issues related to smoking., and with that decreased ability to create said chemicals these people will fell actively less energetic and will begin to show signs of depression, this could also depend on the reason they are smoking. A research study from Mentalhealth.org shows that while people believe smoking helps with stress it has shown that smoking increases anxiety and tension, as nicotine creates a temporary relief that is quickly taken away and causes people to want to smoke more. And the way that this could impact on their physical health is that the more tired and anxious they become the less they will have the energy to try and take care of themselves witch could lead to less sleep and in turn a downturn in effectiveness while they are out working in the field. ,(Mental Health Foundation, 2018)

The United Kingdom Department of Health and the Confederation of British Industry have estimated that 15-30% of workers will experience some form of mental health problem during their working lives, this being said as people who suffer with mental health problems are working and causing themselves more and more stress the likely hood of them calling in absent causing accidents and staff turnover are all affected by this and this could for any normal company cause serious issues regarding the productivity of the company as a whole and especially in the services if someone or even multiple people are not being productive or causing accidents this could lead to somebody possibly losing their life as a direct or indirect consequence of these issues. (Funk, 2000) (Geneva 2000, n.d.)

There are also Social and psychological factors that could hugely impact on mental wellbeing of anybody who does suffer with these issues, just a few of these factors could be a lack of attachment to other people and especially when the person who suffers from lack of this factor was young, Bowlby has a theory that suggest that children come into this world programmed to make attachments as this will aid in their survival, they have a need to become attached to one main person within their lives, this is usually the mother of the child as that is the person they will be with the most, but there is a critical period for forming this attachment which is 2 and a half years and if attachment is not formed within this time it could not ever happen at all, the theory also suggests that continual disruption of forming an attachment with a primary caregiver could possibly lead to long term social emotional and cognitive issues for the infant that has struggled to form this attachment, this could lead to developing depression early in life and continuing to have this all the way into their adult life and also affectionless psychopathy this is an inability to show affection or concern for other people. (McLeod, 2017)

The impact that this could have on an emergency service employee as if they have failed to make this connection properly they could have developed depression among many other possible issues with their mental health , this could become increasingly more taxing on the individual as they could just become emotionless and uncaring in a field where being both of those could cause huge issues within and outside of the workplace as it is necessary for example for NHS workers to have somewhat a resemblance of empathy as it helps with wanting to help others.