Scott Stossel and Andrew Solomon educates readers about mental illnesses explaining how it can happen to anyone. Anxiety and depression symptoms impact people of all ages, race, social strata, etc. and they suffer from the stigmas attached to it, sharing their research, and sharing their personal struggles and experiences with mental illness.
Scott Stossel found a large “stigma with mental illnesses in men like [him]self”.This shows that because of his gender he found it more difficult to seek treatment. More commonly, women suffer from anxiety and need to seek help with their mental health. “Women are stereotypically seen as neurotic or worriers and men are seen as strong and stoic” making it easier for them to come out and speak about their…show more content… More research needs to be done in the field on mental health, but specifically anxiety, as it is such a common problem in today’s world. Famous researchers as Aristotle and Hippocrates believe anxiety is a medical illness but Plato and Spinoza believe it is a philosophical problem. Or perhaps it could be a different problem altogether and be a psychological problem, in which life events that caused him to be this way. Or the potential of it being a spiritual condition, as Søren Kierkegaard believed. Or, finally, it may be —as W. H. Auden and David Riesman and Erich Fromm and Albert Camus have claimed it to be a cultural condition. Since anxiety levels have heightened so much in recent years a function of the times we live in and the structure of our society may be the reasoning behind it. After years of research, Stossel believes it to be a “mixture of of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture”, meaning it can happen to anyone as is not from just one event. Instead, he believes that anxiety is “experienced on a spiritual and psychological level, it is scientifically measurable at serotonin levels in the brain which causes anxiety to be felt at a physiological level”. Anxiety is thought to be brought on by nature (psychological) and nurture (sociological) however this proves the causes of anxiety may be…show more content… Solomon believes that this correlation works against a meaningful conversation about mental health: ‘This person murdered everyone because he was depressed.’ You think, yes, you could sort of indicate here this person was depressed and he murdered everyone, but most people who are depressed do not murder everyone.” The tendency to connect people’s crimes to mental illness diagnoses that are not in fact associated with criminality needs to stop as violence to themselves is more prominent. 90 percent of people who die by suicide have depression or other mental disorders, or substance-abuse disorders in conjunction with other mental disorders. Yet we don’t give this link its due. “Just as the association between mental illness and crime is too strong, the connection between mental illness and suicide is too weak. When articles read ‘so-and-so killed himself because his business had gone bankrupt and his wife had left him.’, yet failed to mention is his mental state for what it was;
