Mental Health And Substance Abuse Essay

Mental Health and Substance Abuse

As discussed in this assignment “Social Welfare Policy is the collective response to social problems and Social Welfare Programs are the product of social welfare policies.” Social Welfare Policy is a public tax-funded system through which the government provides social services, for the nation’s poor and non-poor alike. Social welfare policy ensures laws are prearranged to allow people to maintain suitable standards of living. The social issue that I am interested in is substance abuse and mental health, which are often coupled together and should be addressed as such by social welfare policy in any satisfactory effort to alleviate the problem. Unfortunately, due to stigmatization, it is the poor who suffer the most from substance abuse coupled with mental illness, because social policy is often designed to address one problem or the other but not both.

According to Tussing (1947), there is a dual welfare system at play in the United States—one for the poor and the other for non-poor, middle class, or well to do. Moreover, one system is explicit and stigmatized the other the opposite. The programs have the side effects of keeping the non-poor protected and the poor dependent and weak. He argues:

The differences between poor people's and regular welfare programs are systematic and significant. They mean minimal survival for poor people, and reasonable comfort for non-poor; they mean degradation for poor people, and dignity for non-poor; and most important, they simply continued poverty and dependence for many poor, and continued security and apparent self-reliance for the non-poor. (Tussing, 1947, p. 57)

Tussing points out that the Federal Government has instituted many services that can be utilized to help the citizens of America, such as Social Security, Social Security Disability, Health