MAY I INTRODUCE...
a great nap
"With great power comes great need to take a nap. Wake me up later." - Rick Riordan, The Last Olympian
"With great power comes great need to take a nap. Wake me up later." - Rick Riordan, The Last Olympian
There’s a common misconception about mental illnesses. People assume just because someone has one that they fit into this specific category of lazy people who don’t exercise enough and don’t want to get better. This isn’t the case. People with mental illnesses are not lazy and dedicated to making sure they’re still sick, but in fact, they usually don’t get enough treatment from family practitioners or health specialists. Mental health is not taken seriously. There’s such a gap between treatments of the mentally ill and the physical, as if something needs to be seen to be recognized as bad, as if sick people need to show you they’re sick. In this article, it is said that a boy named Derek Brundrett sought help from his social worker when he felt he was in a state of mental instability. His social worker brushed it off with something along the lines of ‘he looked happy’, and let him go about the rest of his life without recommending him for seeing specialists. As well, the specialists told Brundrett’s mother that the case wasn’t bad enough. Derek Brundrett hanged himself on December 13th, 2012. Mental health affects a lot of people in our world. About 450 million (WHO, 2001) people today suffer from mental illness, and if that isn’t bad enough, only ⅓ of these people get treated. The other ⅔ refrain from doing such due to stigmatization, discrimination and neglect. Even if they seek care, that doesn’t mean they necessarily are getting the level they deserve. A lot of people do not treat mental illnesses to the level they should be and thus are making it harder for people to seek care. Even most general practitioners aren’t equipped to deal with mental health. Now let’s talk about the two different types of mental stigmatization. The first type of stigmatization is usually around disorders such as OCD and forms of anxiety, and they’re treated less seriously because people will say they have them to seem “quirky”. (Gladwell, 2017) It’s happened before, people telling you things that aren’t true, but this limits people. People suddenly think that “quirky” means that it isn’t a serious problem, or that if this person can function with it, why is their employee taking a mental health day? The other stigmatization is associated with disorders like forms of psychosis and schizophrenia; because they’re ill and unable to keep themselves stable without medical attention or help. This usually comes from forms of media like TV shows, who show schizophrenic patients as screaming wildly or killing people. This makes people less likely to seek help as they don’t want to be called “crazy” or be a disappointment to their family. I’m putting crazy in quotes there because schizophrenic patients aren’t crazy. They’re ill. The good thing is that even in Canada, we have mental health services that are available to help you, like at your local ER/hospital and helplines that run 24/7. We need to make these services more readily available in foreign countries, as much of the world don’t even have a bill or legislation for mental health services. We’re doing good on the battle against mental health, but we can do more.
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Noah was sitting on a bench outside, his hands folded in his lap as he glanced around the large campus. He could hear loud yelling, the raising of voices, and wondered what was happening in the nearby building. Suddenly, the door was flung open and a girl stepped out, glancing over her shoulder. Her eyes were bloodshot red, the shininess of her cheeks telling him that she’d been crying as she walked past him. She held herself small, shoulders slumped and pulled together as she watched the ground. He moved to stand up but then clutched his hand into a fist, staying silent.
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Mikayla
A grade ten student who's one hundred percent ready to fight someone on pretty much any topic. ArchivesCategories |