What makes a person stable? What makes a person normal? Who determines what is normal in society? How can we as individuals in society answer this question, when we perceive normalcy in different lights. This is a controversial subject being that we don’t want to deviate from the norms of society. In the grand scheme of things, a person either fits in to society or they don’t; however, in the case of people with mental disorders, there is no room for them in society. The topic of mental illness is considered taboo; we, as society, do not like to talk about the big elephant in the room called “mental illness”; rather than address this huge elephant that continues to get bigger over time, we close our eyes, sweep it under the rug, and hopefully it goes away. This method has somewhat worked, until a couple of years ago, when the dust started coming up from under the rug.
Mental illness is a subject that can no longer be pushed under the rug, due to so many cases of them affecting society, with no fault of theirs. Mental illness is a disease that unfortunately cannot be cured. Although, some mental illness are more involved and serve than others; the entire concept of having a mental disorder automatically promotes negativity and fear within society. For example, if a person with schizophrenia was in the same area as you talking to himself and exhibiting behavior that would be consider volatile and hostile; however, in reality he’s just talking to himself and playing with his cognitively imagined friend. This perception of a person with a mental illness is expected from society; being in the environment makes you feel uncomfortable and or threatened, even though this person is not bothering you or in your space.
There are a couple of articles that I have chosen to further explain and address the arguments I introduce in this paper. One of the articles I chose is mainly associated with the perception of mental illness by the public this article further explains these stereotypical attitudes of society, and it basically goes deeper in analysis of how people deal with mental illness in society. Another article actual uses experimental data to compare the views of how people in society view people with mental disorders. As I explained in the example above, many people see mental illness as social awkward and uncomfortable. The thing that people fail to realize is that on top of the fact these individuals are suffering, yes suffering, from this disease with little to no help being offered to them. The government just recently started shining the light under the rug, meaning they just now started giving the issue of mental illness some attention. The issue of mental illness has ran rapid through the country for two long, with expense to the individual as well as society. Another that is used to further explain this concept uses some examples of how it effects both the person diagnosed and society as a whole. The article also uses fact from the debt deficit and government budget expenses to explain how the neglect of mental illness has effect society not only financially and emotionally. The perception of mental illness of society is downright wrong, due to the taboo of society.
Corrigan, Patrick W., and Amy C. Watson. "PUBLIC STIGMA." National Center for Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 23 July 0005. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.
This article further explains the concept of mental illnesses and disorders meshing with society. This article uses certain situations to explain my intended analysis. It contains some good vantage points on how society deals with mental illness and how they feel towards it being in their personal everyday life; the information that the author gathered in this article is extremely beneficial to my thesis. The author says “Although stigmatizing attitudes are not limited to mental illness, the public seems to disapprove persons with psychiatric disabilities significantly more than
