Learn Mental Hygiene practices

1. Dr. Suresh Kumar Murugesan PhD
Mental Hygiene

2. About the Course Teacher
● Dr.Suresh Kumar Murugesan is a passionate Professor, researcher
and Mental Health Practitioner from Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India
● At present he is heading the department of Psychology, The
American College, Madurai
● He is very keen in learning new research studies in behavioural
Sciences and open to learn.
● His ultimate aim is to make impression in the field of Knowledge
● His area of specializations are Psychomentry, Psychotherapy,
Positive Psychology, Education Psychology, Cognitive Psychology,
Cyber Psychology etc
● WhatsApp +91 975040 6463 email - sureshkumar800@yahoo.com

3. Hygiene
Hygiene is a series of practices
performed to preserve health.

4. Hygiene
According to the World Health Organization, "Hygiene
refers to conditions and practices that help to maintain
health and prevent the spread of diseases."

5. Personal hygiene
Personal hygiene refers to maintaining the body's
cleanliness.

6. Mental hygiene
Mental hygiene is the practice of trying to maintain
mental health through proactive behavior and
treatment.
Mental health is “one's overall psychological well-
being.”

7. Mental hygiene
Mental hygiene is what we do to keep our
mind healthy.

8. Mental hygiene
movement
The founder of the mental hygiene movement,
Clifford Whittingham Beers, wrote an
autobiography in 1908 titled A Mind That Found
Itself.
It dealt frankly with his mental health struggles and
called for reform in the field of mental health
treatment.

9. Mental hygiene
Practicing mental hygiene
is an ongoing process.
Understanding what it is
and how to practice it can
help improve our quality of
life.

10. Mental hygiene
Mental hygiene, the science of
maintaining mental health and preventing
the development of psychosis, neurosis,
or other mental disorders.

11. Health WHO “health is a state of complete physical,
mental, and social well-being, and not
merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
The term mental health represents a variety of
human aspirations:
a. rehabilitation of the mentally disturbed,
b. prevention of mental disorder,
c. reduction of tension in a stressful
world, and
d. attainment of a state of well-being in
which the individual functions at a level
consistent with his or her mental
potential.

12. Mental hygiene
Mental hygiene includes all measures
taken to promote and to preserve mental
health.
Community mental health refers to the
extent to which the organization and
functioning of the community determines,
or is conducive to, the mental health of its
members.

13. Optimum mental
health
1. As noted by the World Federation for Mental Health, the
concept of optimum mental health refers not to an absolute
or ideal state but to the best possible state insofar as
circumstances are alterable.
2. Mental health is regarded as a condition of the individual,
relative to the capacities and social-environmental context
of that person.

14. A very few year ago would have been
difficult to justify the inclusion of the
concept on mental hygiene in a general
treatise on preventive medicine and
hygiene.

15. The medico-legal term “insanity” was
used to designate all abnormal mental
states and the incorrect conception of
mental and physical diseases as
distinct and practically unrelated was
widely accepted.

16. The misconceptions and the
hopelessness, both as to cure and
prevention, which characterized the
medical attitude toward mental
diseases combined to disassociate
mental medicine and its problems from
the subjects which were engaging the
attention of physicians and sanitarians
generally.

17. The determination to prevent diseases which was
beginning to dominate the medical profession
would soon extend into the domain of mental
medicine.
Today, however, a treatise on the prevention of
disease which failed to include a chapter on mental
hygiene would neglect an important field of
preventive medicine.

18. The realization that many forms of mental disease
depend in a large measure upon preventable
causes, the rapid growth of psychiatry and its
acceptance as a department of scientific medicine,
and the newly discovered opportunities for utilizing
its resources in practical attempts to deal with
social problems have broken down the barriers
which so long and so effectually isolated mental
medicine.

19. Why is mental hygiene
important?
Mental hygiene was first recorded in the
English language in the 1840s, when it was
used in the title of a book by William
Sweetser, a medical doctor and professor.
In the early 1900s, psychologist Clifford
Wittingham Beers started a mental hygiene
movement after experiencing mistreatment
while at mental institutions for anxiety and
depression.
He championed improved treatment of
people with mental disorders and increased
awareness about mental illness—topics
that are still relevant today.

20. Some common
mental hygiene
practices
Many of the practiced mental hygiene without even knowing
it.
Psychologists recommend strategies like being aware of
emotional pain and managing (but not suppressing)
negative feelings.
● Even simple self-care activities can be part of an
effective mental hygiene routine:
● listening to calming or upbeat music,
● talking about feelings with friends or family, and
● keeping the mind busy by doing small tasks.

21. Mental
Hygiene
Sometimes mental hygiene is more formal, such as seeking
the care of mental health professionals.
The strategies can help to maintain mental health, which is the
goal of mental hygiene.
Importantly, practicing good mental hygiene can help us deal
with psychological trauma, like
● the death of a loved one,
● a professional failure, or
● a romantic rejection.

22. Physical
and Mental
Hygiene
● Physical hygiene is part of our daily routine, and many
mental health professionals are working to bring
awareness to the role of mental hygiene in maintaining
and improving mental health and preventing mental
illness.
● The next time when wash the hands or brush the teeth,
think about what it can do for our mental hygiene!

23. Mental hygiene
Mental hygiene stresses the integration of
the person —body, mind, environment.
It draws where it will and can for its
bases.

24. Mental
Hygiene
The World Health Organisation (WHO) itself
makes it clear: "Mental health is an integral
part of health; indeed, there is no health
without mental health".
Mental Hygiene practice included
1. how to avoid negative behaviour,
2. achieve emotional equilibrium and
3. improve our quality of life.

25. Mental Hygiene The psychological repercussions of this health
emergency have highlighted the necessity to
maintain well-being through mental hygiene.
This medical practice, initiated by the American
psychiatrist Clifford Whittingham Beers back in
1909, defines the set of practices that allow a
person to enjoy mental health and be in harmony
with his or her socio-cultural surroundings.
The behaviours that it covers are designed to
prevent negative behaviour, provide emotional
stability and improve quality of life.

26. Mental Health
Good mental health enables us to learn, reason, interact, produce, face difficulties
and put our best face on things, to quote a few examples. That's why the UN and
WHO warn that its decline presents a grave social and economic problem:
depression and anxiety alone produce annual losses of over $1bn at global
level, whilst serious mental health issues reduce life expectancy by 10 to 20
years.

27. Need of mental
Hygiene
In these difficult times, mental hygiene is the key
to protecting society's most vulnerable, such
as the young.
In most of the countries, one of the countries worst
affected by COVID-19, 32 % of adolescents with
underlying health problems have been adversely
affected by the pandemic, and 31 % of Italian and
Spanish parents say that their children feel more
lonely due to the isolation measures.
These figures should not be overlooked since
suicide is the second leading cause of death
worldwide in the 15-29 age group.

28. Need of mental Hygiene
In a world with over 264 million people suffering depression and a pandemic threatening an
explosion in the number of cases, as the UN warns in the report mentioned earlier, mental
health has become a top priority for governments.
The UN itself considers it imperative to urgently strengthen psychological care
services in the face of alarming figures coming from countries like the US, where 45 %
of the population have seen a deterioration in their emotional state due to the coronavirus,
according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).

29. Mental Hygiene movement
● Mental hygiene, the public-health perspective within psychiatry, was influential from
1910 until about 1960.
● Since World War II, mental hygiene ideas became increasingly incorporated into
mainstream psychiatry, in particular through the community health movement of the
1960s.
● The mental hygiene, or mental health, movement thereafter ceased to exist as a
separate movement.

30. Instead of focusing on the
treatment of mental illness,
mental hygienists emphasized
early intervention, prevention,
and the promotion of mental
health.

31. Mental hygienists were
interested in children because
they were convinced that
mental illness and mental
disorder were to an important
extent related to early
childhood experiences.

32. Mental hygienists interest in
prevention made them focus
their public-health education
activities on reaching parents
to inform them about the latest
scientific insights in child
development and child rearing.

33. Mental hygienists also viewed
the educational system as a
suitable location for preventive
activity and became involved in
programs for teacher education
and educational reform.

34. The Mental
Hygiene Movement

35. Origins Of The Mental Hygiene Movement
● The National Committee for Mental Hygiene was founded in New York in 1909 by a
number of leading psychiatrists and Clifford W. Beers (1876–1943), who had been
institutionalized in several mental hospitals after a nervous breakdown.
● He described his experiences and the deplorable conditions in mental hospitals in his
autobiography A Mind That Found Itself (1913).

36. Origins Of The Mental Hygiene Movement
● The National Committee aimed to improve conditions in mental hospitals, stimulate
research in psychiatry, improve the quality of psychiatric education, develop measures
preventing mental illness, and popularize psychiatric and psychological perspectives.
● Although mental hygiene originated within psychiatry, mental hygiene ideas also inspired
social workers, teachers, psychologists, sociologists, and members of other professions.
Consequently the mental hygiene movement became interdisciplinary in nature.

37. Origins Of The Mental
Hygiene Movement
During the 1920s, Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic ideas
became increasingly influential in the United States.
Psychoanalysis emphasized the importance of early
childhood experiences and their impact on mental health
later in life.
Mental hygienists became convinced that preventive
intervention was best directed at growing children and
those individuals who had the most extensive contact with
them: parents and teachers.
Initially mental hygienists emphasized the importance of
therapeutic intervention in the emotional problems of young
children. They later also emphasized the importance of
fostering mental health in all growing children.

38. Origins Of
The Mental
Hygiene
Movement
● Starting in the 1920s, mental hygienists promoted a
therapeutic perspective toward the everyday problems
of children.
● The National Committee was instrumental in the
establishment of child guidance clinics. Initially these
clinics were associated with juvenile courts.
● They were modeled upon the clinic of William Healy
(1869–1963), who had been the first director of the
Juvenile Psychopathic Institute in Chicago, which was
associated with the juvenile court there.
● In 1917 he became the director of the Judge Baker
Foundation in Boston.

39. Origins Of The Mental
Hygiene Movement
1. According to Healy, juvenile delinquents needed to
be investigated individually by a team consisting of a
psychologist, a psychiatrist, and a social worker in
order to ascertain the child's abilities, home
background, emotional life, motivations, and
intelligence.
2. On this basis an individualized treatment plan could
be developed and implemented.
3. During the 1930s child guidance clinics came to
focus less on diagnosing and treating juvenile
delinquents and more on the therapeutic treatment
of the emotional problems of children from middle-
class families.
4. Child guidance clinics increasingly treated parents
and children who came for help on their own
initiative.

40. Origins Of The Mental Hygiene Movement
● During the 1920s academic research on children became increasingly respectable and well
organized as a consequence of the funding provided by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller
Memorial, a large philanthropic organization that supported research in child development at
several academic institutions.
● The aim was to investigate the development of normal children and to popularize the findings of
this research.
● Inspired by this research, a number of leading mental hygienists argued that preventive activity
should no longer be focused on detecting early signs of maladjustment but instead on tracing
aberrations in normal child development.
● Consequently preventive activity was potentially directed at all children instead of only those
children who were troublesome to parents and teachers.
● During the 1930s a few leading mental hygienists developed educational programs aimed at
fostering mental health in schoolchildren.

41. Mental Hygiene And The Educational System
● Mental hygienists viewed the educational system as a promising venue for
preventive activities because it could potentially reach all children.
● During the 1930s they successfully influenced teacher education programs to include
developmental psychology.
● Initially they wanted to raise awareness among teachers about the ramifications of
educational practices–particularly methods of maintaining control and punishment for
transgressions–for mental health.

42. Mental Hygiene And The Educational System
● A number of educational reformers became interested in mental hygiene to provide a
rationale for educational reform by claiming that the curriculum needed to be
organized in conformity with insights in child development.
● In addition, many Progressive educators viewed the school as the place where
children were trained for adjustment; they viewed the school as the preparation for
life.
● The life adjustment movement in education claimed that the school should train the
whole child and not just his or her intellect.
● Educational reformers criticized the traditional academic curriculum for its emphasis
on mental discipline and rote learning, which they saw as irrelevant for most children.
● They advocated instead a variety of educational initiatives such as vocational training
and project learning.
● The influence of these ideas on education was profound: the development of the
personality became one of the central goals of education.

43. Mental Hygiene And
The Educational
System
● The influence of mental hygiene ideas after
World War II was illustrated by the pervasive
interest of parents, especially mothers, in
child-rearing literature.
● Critics have argued that this literature made
mothers unnecessarily worried about the
well-being of their children, and the influence
of mental hygiene ideas on education was
countered at times by an emphasis on the
teaching of basic academic skills.
● In the 1990s the influence of psychiatric and
psychological ideas on educational practice
has been criticized as one of the causes of
educational decline in North America.

44. Mental Hygiene - Strategies
● When we think of proper hygiene, actions such as brushing our teeth and washing our hands probably
come to mind.
● However, these practices only focus on physical hygiene. They do nothing to take care of our minds.
● In his book "The Time Bandit Solution: Recovering Stolen Time You Never Knew You Had," Edward G.
Brown presents the concept of "mental hygiene," which focuses on caring for our mind the same way we
do for our body.
● Just as physical hygiene keeps our body in top condition to move and function, taking care of our mental
hygiene keeps our mind sharp.
● Brown designed the concept "for the purpose of increasing sustained behavioral peak performance
through concentration."
● He focuses on strategies for ridding our mind of destructive, negative thoughts and filling it with
positive affirmations and self-esteem boosters.
● Here are Brown's six techniques for taking care of our mental hygiene to keep our mind ready to tackle a
challenge at any time:

45. 1. Transcend the
environment
● To transcend the environment, we must mentally overcome any
physical factors that we can't control, such as when the air
conditioning goes out at work during a hot summer.
● Instead of focusing on the fact that we're sweaty and
uncomfortable, distract ourselves with pleasant or innocuous
thoughts, Brown says.
● It's like the old adage: mind over matter.

46. 2. Cultivate
constructive
acceptance
● Learn not only to accept the physical
things we cannot change, but to accept
them graciously, Brown advises.
● In high school, Brown dreamed of playing
center in the NBA, but he was too short
to excel at the position.
● Instead of compromising and playing
forward or guard, he gave up on
basketball.
● Years later, Brown realized he should
have constructively accepted his
handicap and found another way to
pursue his NBA dreams instead of
dropping them entirely.

47. 3. Visualize the
ideal self
● Before taking on any task, from tackling a
hefty to-do list to giving a company-wide
presentation, visualize ourselves coming out
successful.
● If we can picture our ideal outcome of a
challenge, we can then inhabit that ideal self
as an actually go through the challenge,
explains Brown. "It means visualizing
ourselves successful with all the goals we
hope to achieve, despite challenges,
conflicts, and adversity," he says.
● This visualizing technique shouldn't be saved
just for big events - it should be part of your
everyday mental hygiene routine, Brown
adds.

48. 4. Use positive
affirmation.
● Think of a phrase that gets motivated -
for example, "You can do it" - and repeat
it as it tell to self to think positive
thoughts.
● Although it may feel silly at first, Brown
warns, we'll eventually program our
subconscious to associate the phrase
with an uplifting feeling, motivating us to
power through any situation.
● Brown has conditioned himself so that his
phrase triggers an automatic adrenaline
rush.

49. 5. Practice
psychological
counterpunching.
● Brown draws this technique from famed
boxer Muhammed Ali, who said that, "A good
counterpuncher will hit without being hit."
● To implement this psychologically, Brown
suggests using a double dose of positive
affirmations.
● When a negative thought comes to mind,
such as "I'll never finish this on time," first
block it by saying something like "Yes, I
can," and then knock it away with a phrase
such as "Just do it."

50. 6. Change your internal
computer chip
● Like computer memory chips, our minds
become programmed to constantly think
certain things, Brown says.
● So in order to change a negative
behavior, we must replace it with a
positive one.
● Instead of simply telling yourself to stop
doing something, concentrate on the habit
we'd like to replace it with and stick with it.
● "We must do the same thing every time
we lose focus so that our new memory
chip will allow us to relax," Brown says.

51. References
1. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/mental-hygiene
2. https://www.britannica.com/science/mental-hygiene
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1586143/
4. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/283490
5. https://www.iberdrola.com/talent/mental-hygiene
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health
7. https://dictionary.apa.org/mental-hygiene
8. https://www.businessinsider.in/strategy/6-Ways-To-Take-Care-Of-Your-Mental-
Hygiene/articleshow/39192204.cms
9. https://www.encyclopedia.com/medicine/psychology/psychology-and-psychiatry/mental-hygiene