Mental Health Locus of Control Scale

1. Psychotherapy is for people who can’t make it alone and need someone stronger than themselves to lean on.

2. To recover from a serious mental problem‚ you must be willing to temporarily surrender all responsibility to an experienced professional.

3. People with psychological problems should play a large part in planning their own treatment.

4. Someone receiving psychiatric help should not make any important decisions without seeking advice.

5. When a psychiatric patient is trying out new behaviors a professional should decide which behaviors s/he should try first.

6. The decision as to when to end psychotherapy should be taken by the patient rather than the therapist.

7. The lives of people with psychological problems are so complicated that it is almost impossible for them to figure out what they should do to make things better.

8. If psychotherapy is like building a house‚ a good therapist should not only give you the tools but should design the house for you.

9. Psychotherapists should tell their patients how to lead a healthy life instead of waiting to see if they find out for themselves.

10. Patients should try hard to accept their therapist’s opinion as to what is right and wrong.

11. When an individual goes to a therapist for help that individual should expect to take most of the responsibility for getting better.

12. In psychotherapy what the therapist thinks is less important than what the client thinks.

13. Most patients leaving a psychiatric hospital should be strictly supervised for some period of time.

14. The goals of psychotherapy should be set by the client rather than the therapist.

15. In group therapy the individuals who benefit the most are almost always those who pay the most attention to group leaders.

16. The mentally ill should not be encouraged to have others take care of their everyday needs

17. If a psychiatric patient feels sure he/she is well enough to stop taking medication‚ that is what he/she should do.

18. The aim of anyone who gets into psychotherapy is to seek the advice of an expert and to act on it.

19. As a general rule psychiatrists should feel o.k. about making decisions on behalf of their patients.

20. A good psychotherapist expects clients to decide for themselves what they should do.

21. Going to a professional to discuss your problems is better than talking to friends because the advice of a professional is more valuable.

22. When experiencing psychological problems the person least likely to come up with solutions is oneself.

1. Eventually medical science will discover a cure for psychosis.

2. The cause of most psychological problems can be found in the brain.

3. If the children of schizophrenics were raised by normal parents they would probably grow up to be healthy.

4. Mental illness is usually caused by some disease of the nervous system.

5. Some people are born mentally unstable and are almost certain to spend some part of their lives in a mental hospital.

6. Most people suffering from mental illness were born with some kind of psychological deficit.

7. Some people are born depressed and stay that way.

8. Everybody’s system has a breaking point and those of mental patients are probably weaker.

9. The mental illness of some people is caused by the separation or divorce of their parents during childhood.

10. Being hot-blooded is the cause of mental illness in some people.

11. More money should be spent on discovering healthy methods of child rearing than determining the biological basis of mental illness.

12. Some people are born with the kind of nervous system that makes it easy for them to become emotionally disturbed.

13. Your choice of friends can have a lot to do with your becoming mentally ill.

14. Although they usually aren’t aware of it‚ many people become mentally ill to avoid the difficult problems of everyday life.

15. Some people are born with slightly greater capacity than others to commit suicide later in life.

16. Many normal people would become mentally ill if they had to live in very stressful situations.

17. Many health professionals probably underestimate the extent to which brain damage is responsible for mental illness.

18. When a group of people are forced to live under extremely stressful conditions the ones who crack under the strain are likely to be the ones who inherited a psychologically weak disposition.

19. The kind of nervous system you are born with has little to do with whether you become psychotic.

20. The cause of many psychological problems is bad nerves.