How does mental illness affect society?
Is mental illness a social problem?
Why is mental health important in today’s society?
Why is mental health so stigmatized?
Mental illness and society
There are many kinds of illness. People are suffering from arthritis, cancer, kidney dysfunction, malnutrition, stomach issues, kidney stones, sugar, blood pressure, high cholesterol and the list goes on beyond explanation. Apart from all these types of illness, there is another type of illness which is usually not accepted by the society as a disease.
People who suffer from mental illness are considered as insane or crazy. They are considered to be over reacting or emotional. This is the main reason the one who is suffering feels ashamed of his disease and is reluctant to explain how he feels which ultimately cause a lot of distress.
There are alot of people around us who are fighting with mental illness. They are in depression and we as a part of society making it difficult for them rather than healing their pain. If a person start crying, we call them emotional, crying baby and so on.
However, do we ever try to understand why are they like this? From the day we will start understanding there situation, the pain they are going through; there will be very less number of people suffering with mental illness.
Suicidal attempts
All of us may have heard a lot of times about someone who was totally fit yesterday and committed suicide the other day. or, we heard people trying to attempt suicide. But, we have always misjudged them. That person was not ok at all and suffering from Mental illness and society syndromes. He wanted to have sympathy or at least empathy from the society.
He needed to be taken care of. He wanted to share his grief and sorrow with someone. He wanted to have a person to whom he could talk about all that he was going through. He wanted to share this burden with someone but social stigma in our society did not allow him to do so.
May be if he shared his sorrow he would not have attempted this extreme step. That’s why our society needs to be compassionate towards patients of depression and mental illness. We should be flexible enough that people feel easy and good in sharing there sorrows with us.
Let’s just stop making fun of other emotional instability and start understanding and communicating with them about there feelings and problems.
Forms of Mental illness
Mental illness can be observed in any form. Some have genetic issues leading to poor mental health and the person is mentally disable others have temporary illness like depression which can be cured by proper guidance and medicine.
There are a lot of psychologist and psychiatrists around us who are working to sure mental illness and depression for free. Also, there are different organisation working for the same purpose.
Consequences of mental illness and society
- In extreme cases mental illness may cause memory loss.
- It can lead you to violent behaviour.
- It can make you feel worthless.
- It diminishes your ability of critical thinking and problem solving.
- It affects grades of students. Students who always secure A’s are unable to get through the examination.
- It can cause obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD
- It can also cause drug addiction in few cases.
What can we do in the case of mental health and society?
- If we want to take part towards wellness of our society then we must accept, that like other diseases mental illness is also a disease.
- We should talk more and more about this illness so that it does not remain a taboo any more.
- We should try to make people believe that psychological appointments are completely normal.
What should a victim do for himself?
Victims with mental or psychological problems tend to confine themselves within their private place. They leave all the social gatherings due to bad comments about their illness and their behaviour. So, they become isolated and are surrounded by their internal trauma and unnecessary thoughts. Which in words is called over thinking.
That’s something a victim should work on. He should involve himself in healthy activities and keep himself busy that’s what they are required to change from behavioural point of view while taking antidepressants or other medication prescribed by the doctor as you may be deficient in some significant vitamins.
He should also go on long walks mostly in the morning. The morning air has something really charismatic. It has really good effect on mood and mind. Try to do something for others like helping poor and using your abilities for benefit of others.
Also, they need to work on there own SELF MOTIVATION.