Mental Illness Research Paper

Feelings of hopelessness and anxiety should not be considered personality traits, so why do some people consider them to be? Our society largely ignores mental illness, and this ignorance is culpable for the decomposition of the lives of mentally ill people. Not many people know the signs of mental illness, and their illness is often mistaken for common personality traits, and they live their entire lives harder than they should be. If mental illness was more commonly talked about, then there would be more studies and more medications for mentally ill people. There would be less people who blatantly do not believe in mental illness.
The majority of people do not believe in mental illness. They think that it is made up. This is, for the most …show more content…
These people know that the brain can become afflicted with something as severe as depression, because studies have shown that even having a common cold can cause “feelings of malaise, low mood and muddled thinking” (1)’ (WSJ). They can see the damage that mental illness has caused in the lives of other people. One woman had depression and anxiety and it caused her to have “intrusive thoughts that [her] husband was trying to kill [her] daughter” (1)’ (Netmums). Her mental illness ultimately caused her and her husband to split up. Most people would blame the woman, not her mental illness, for her divorce. If mental illness awareness was higher in today’s world, then the victims of mental illness would be seen for what they truly are: victims. Steve Comer thought that he was having problems with his heart, until his doctor asked him if he thought he “might be experiencing anxiety” (1)’ (Comer). Steve did not “know what panic attacks felt like” (1)’ (Comer) because he did not know the proliferate signs of his condition.. As a result, his “symptoms kept piling up on” (1)’ (Comer) him. All of this could have been prevented if the public was better educated on the reality of mental …show more content…
Mental conditions are not yet fully accepted and recognized by the general public. “The brain is the most complex organ in the whole body” (1)’ (National Institute on Drug Abuse), so it might take awhile to be fully studied and understood. But enough concrete evidence has been found to expedite the process, such as “PET scans of the brain showing different activity levels in a person with depression” (1)’ (Web Md) than a person without depression. There have been many effective medications created to deal with mental illness, and many have been engineered to “be safer and generally cause fewer bothersome side effects” (1)’ (Mayo Clinic). This is miles away from the mental illness treatment of yesteryears, which included the lobotomy, which “was the first psychiatric treatment designed to alleviate suffering by disrupting brain circuits that might cause symptoms” (3)’ (Vann) but “the procedure wasn’t effective enough to justify its risks” (3)’ (Vann). Many steps have been made to recognize and treat mental illness, but society is not yet where it needs to be. I believe in mental illness because no one should have to feel like “no one [likes]” them, that they “[can not] make friends,” and that they “[are not] likeable” (Barrett 1). Every single person deserves an equal chance at life, and mental illness should not continue to be successful in taking those chances away, and

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