Mental Health: A Report by the Surgeon General

This chapter thus far has highlighted some of the psychosocial influences on mental health and mental illness. Stressful life events, affect (mood and level of arousal), personality, and gender are prominent psychological influences. Social influences include parents, socioeconomic status, racial, cultural, and religious background, and interpersonal relationships. These psychosocial influences, taken individually or together, are integrated into many chapters of this report in discussions of epidemiology, etiology, risk factors, barriers to treatment, and facilitators to recovery.

Since these psychosocial influences are familiar to the general reader, detailed description of each is beyond the scope of this section (with the exception of cultural influences, which are discussed in the Overview of Cultural Diversity and Mental Health Services section). Instead, this section summarizes the sweeping theories of individual behavior and personality that inspired a vast body of psychosocial research: psychodynamic theories, behaviorism, and social learning theories. The therapeutic strategies that arose from these theories, and modifications necessary to make them relevant to the changing demography of the U.S. population, are discussed in a later section, Overview of Treatment.

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