MENT3000 Student Guide: Exploring the Role of Happiness in Diagnosing Mental Health Disorders

Reflection on chosen essential reading – what things didn’t I know about the topic/issue before I read the article and what have I learned now, what content in the article was most interesting to me and piqued my interest in the topic, what am I left wanting to know/research further about the topic/issue as a result, and therefore why do I need to research this further and then implement that new knowledge to improve my clinical practice? (max. 350 words)

The most interesting part of this satirical paper is that Bentall (1992) has imitated that the human definition for defining abnormality is flawed, as happiness can even fit into this definition. Before going through this paper, I had always assumed that happiness is the most positive psychological state for humans, and deviating from the state of happiness means, deviating from the state of normality and inclining towards abnormality. But, Bentall (1992) contrasted with my beliefs, and after going through this paper, my perception of measuring psychological normality and abnormality and the criteria for judging the psychological state of people has been completely changed. Before I read this paper, I believed that we could assess the psychological state of people/patients by looking at their level of happiness, but after reading the findings of Bentall (1992), I realise that the traditional humanistic definition of abnormality is incorrect, such as we look at the people and label them as normal if they are smiling or are showing happy characteristics. However, in contrast to this, it has been depicted that happiness meets all the criteria of abnormality, made by the humans such as linking it with Schizophrenia or hypomania (Bentall, 1992, p. 96).  This piece of information has changed my perception of distinguishing between normality and abnormality and has ignited my interest to gain a more in-depth analysis of this topic. I believe, that researching more on this topic can help me in my future practices, such as if I know and discover the correct definition and measures for assessing abnormality of the human brain and behaviour, I will be able to provide more patient-centred care to patients experiencing mental health issues. The findings of Bental (1992) have made me curious to know more about the relevance of happiness with mental health issues, which can help me learn the accurate diagnostic approaches to psychopathology and assess the normality and abnormality characteristics in the patients effectively.  

Reference:

Bentall, R. P. (1992). A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder. Journal of medical ethics, 18(2), 94. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1376114/pdf/jmedeth00282-0040.pdf?platform=hootsuite

PIO/PEO research question – what is the specific PIO/PEO research question for my literature review resulting from my reflection on the chosen essential reading? (max. 1 sentence)

Research Question: Can mental health nurses consider happiness as a diagnostic classification approach to psychopathology in patents experiencing hypomania or Schizophrenia?

Search strategy – what were the inclusion/exclusion criteria, databases, exact search terms, and limiters I used to search for journal articles answering my research question? (max. 175 words)

The databases named as PsycINFO, MEDLINE, and Emcare were initially searched for the retrieval of articles. PsyINFO showed 3 articles, while Emcare showed 2 articles. But those articles were excluded on the basis of irrelevance with the research question. The search began using synonyms and keywords such as happ*, mental disorders, etc. The search filters used for each database were the publication date, AND filters and full availability of the text. For MEDLINE, the other filters included selecting human for the species, and the language of the articles which was selected as English. For google scholar, the only filter applied was date relevancy, which was selected with in a range of 5 years, stating from 2019 till 2024. Moreover, the articles that focused on hypomania and schizophrenia and depicted a connection of these health conditions with happiness and mental health disorders were considered. Then 5 articles were selected on the basis of the relevancy with the topic and the closest publication dates.

Articles included in evidence synthesis (n=5)

·         n=1: longitudinal cohort design (Spinhoven et al., 2021).

·         n=1: Literature review (Miremadi & Asadi, 2023)

·         n=1: Cross sectional case control design quantitative study (Gutiérrez-Rojas et al., 2021).

·         n=1: Quantitative study using CAINS scale (Rekhi et al., 2021).

·         n=1: Machine learning analytic approach (Parker et al., 2021).

Reasons for removing articles:

·         The articles were irrelevant

·         The results of the papers were not able to answer the research question effectively

·         Some articles were removed as terms of search were limited to titles only

·         Search was not full text, or in required language (English).

·         Some were not in the set date range as required.

Articles removed for following reasons:

·         The articles focused more on interventions of mental health problem and were less inclined towards happiness and its association with mental health abnormalities.

Articles identified from the search databases (Emcare, Medline, PsychINFO and google scholar) per described search strategy (n=5)

Records identified (n = 30)

Title and abstracts screened (n = 25)

Full-text articles assessed for eligibility (n = 5)

Articles included in evidence synthesis (n = 5)

·  n = Quantitative research studies + APA 7 in-text style citation of matching sources

·  n = Qualitative research studies + APA 7 in-text style citation of matching sources

·  n = Mixed-methods research studies + APA 7 in-text style citation of matching sources

·  n = Systematic/integrative literature reviews + APA 7 in-text style citation of matching sources

·  n = General/narrative literature reviews + APA 7 in-text style citation of matching sources

·  n = Other (identify type) + APA 7 in-text style citation of matching sources

Duplicate articles removed before screening (n = 5)

Articles removed for the following reasons (i.e. explain how you determined which sources to remove) (n = ):

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Articles removed for the following reasons (i.e. explain how you determined which sources to remove) (n = ):

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Identification

Screening

Included