Mental Health: Is it a bigger problem?
Or a louder problem?
The last time I fell off a bike, I was a 15-year-old off on an exchange program in Rhode Island. My friend and I were enjoying the warm sunlight and refreshing breeze riding along the Block Island Trail. Ted, behind me, shouted ‘Watch out!’. As I looked behind me trying to figure out what he meant, a metal rod slipped through the spokes of the wheel, catapulting me forward into the gravel road. And that’s how I got a rock stuck in my knee. Thankfully, with a little bit of help from strangers and a first aid kit, my knee healed successfully, leaving only a tiny red scar on my knee to remind me of the memory. What if I asked you when was the last time you fell of a bike? The last time you got physically hurt? You would probably be easily capable of telling me about the last time your body got hurt, and how it healed. Now what if I asked you when was the last time you felt sad? Anxious? Scared? Depressed? When was the last time you felt like you were the only person in the planet that felt that way? Ironically enough, the human capacity to endure pain, in its many ways and forms, is something every person, regardless of age and gender, can relate to. We are all “cursed” with the human condition, and yet very few of us actually understand it or even talk about it without the fear of being judged or misinterpreted. The first step in solving the lack of understanding surrounding mental health, is recognizing it. Then and only then, we can start to fix it, although it might not need to be completely fixed at all.
The first question that comes up when trying to understand a concept is: what it is it? What is mental health? Unfortunately, mental health is not quite easily explained in simple terms, due to its inexact borders and ever-shifting nature. To this date, there is no concrete or exact definition of the term. A simple search on google will give you plenty of misguiding, different, and confusing definitions, some that do not even correlate with one another. The first appearance of the concept can be traced back all the way to 1843, when a book titled An Examination of the Intellect and Passions first defined mental hygiene as: the healthy mental and physical development of the citizen. It wasn’t until 1950 when the WHO’s expert committee on mental health, first defined the term as “a condition, subject to fluctuations due to biological and social factors, which enables the individual to achieve a satisfactory synthesis of his own potentially conflicting, instinctive drives; to form and maintain harmonious relations with others; and to participate in constructive changes in his social and physical environment.” (World Health Organization) Despite the clear progress on understanding the subject in the recent, a clear and widely accepted definition of mental health is still missing. It does not take an expert to notice that the Dorland’s Medical Dictionary does not even have an entry on mental health or that from multiple dictionaries each and every one of them provide a different meaning for mental health and mental hygiene. This lack of a solid foundation, lack of reassurance, and of trust, makes the concept of mental health seem like a very thin floor to walk on. How can you talk openly about something you don’t even fully grasp? When the floor below starts to crack, questions and misconceptions tend to come up.
One of those questions is: are mental health and mental illness the same? They are not. The misconception that these two are interchangeable terms that mean the same creates this negative image around mental health and anything related to it. While mental health may not have an exact definition, it is a fact that everyone possesses some level of it; mental illness on the other hand, is not something every single person has to deal with. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines mental illness as “any of a broad range of medical conditions that are marked primarily by sufficient disorganization of personality, mind, or emotions to impair normal psychological functioning and cause marked distress or disability and that are typically associated with a disruption in normal thinking, feeling, mood, behavior, interpersonal interactions, or daily functioning”. Mental health is similar to regular health in a way that there are different levels of health. One way of attempting to understand the difference between mental illness and mental health is similar to a person walking up and down the stairs; up meaning great mental health and down meaning poor. Most people usually fall somewhere in the middle and strive to move up, but mental illnesses are like heavy backpacks that some unlucky few have to carry, making it harder for them to move up the stairs. Fortunately, like every illness, it can be treated and cured. The heavy weight in the backpack can be lightened. Unfortunately, in today’s society mental illnesses are not treated the same way physical illnesses are, and that is the problem.
The stigma built around mental illness stems from the way mental illnesses are treated in today’s society. The way patients with mental illnesses are treated, in contrast, stems from the lack of understanding of the difference between mental health and mental illness. Often times mentally ill people get confused as mentally weak people, when that is exactly not the case. Mental illnesses, as stated before in this paper, are as real as physical illnesses but because of their extreme complexity, they are harder to understand and not treated in the same way. Take for example a patient with cancer, a disease that is very much considered deadly, that goes to the doctor in order to get treatment. The patient would probably receive an explanation of where the cancer is located and the possible strategies that could be used in order to fight off the disease. In most cases, one of those strategies would be chosen, and the patient would receive ongoing treatment for a long period of time, until the illness is cured or the patient inevitably passes away. Now, what if the patient was diagnosed not with cancer, but with depression? Excluding specific counseling centers, spiritual retreats, or any other type of unconventional health and wellness center, most patients diagnosed with any type of mental illness would be given a questionnaire and a pamphlet. It is laughable. This mistreatment happens because there are no actual physical symptoms that can be pinpointed and treated the way a non-mental illness would. This makes it even more difficult for people to understand their individual situations and cope with their problems. We can clearly see the repercussions this erroneous way of treating mental health and mental illness has had in the global population, in today’s world.
When it comes to the topic of mental health in the 21stcentury, we encounter a crossroad. Over the last two decades there has been plenty of research done on mental health and mental illness in relation to today’s society. Many of these studies conclude that anxiety, stress, and depression are marked higher now than they were in the 20thcentury, specifically more in the youth generations of millennials and generation z’s. This could easily be confirmed just by simply checking how much suicide rates in young adults have increased in the recent years, or by noticing the intrusion of mental health in the global pop culture. Social media, vocabulary use, movies, music, etc. These all showcase the impact mental health has had in the global population and how it has slowly become a regular, day to day topic. However, although one could argue that the human population is pretty much worse, mentally and emotionally, there is also research that states the contrary.
As a professional from the Lehigh’s Counseling Center says: … there are plenty of societal factors that influence that. I get torn between how much exactly the problem is rising vs how much more it is being talked about.” It is easy to get lost in all the data, and ideas that mental illnesses and poor mental health have become the new normal but that is not exactly the case. Over the last few decades we have seen how mental health has been portrayed, sometimes poorly, in media and society. Movies, songs, fake news, books, etc. These are all ways through which mental health has made itself “known” to the world. Although this renewed presence in the daily life of people could most definitely have had a negative impact on those who were struggling with their own mental health, it also brought light to the issue that was hiding underneath the shadow all along. Thanks to the increasing portrayal of mental health and mental illnesses, the general population, although still suffering from the lack of control over their mental health, is more knowledgeable of the issue than previous generations were. The problem with mental health is not that it is not talked about anymore, it is very much a hot topic. The real issue, is that there is yet a clear understanding and portrayal on what “good” mental health conceptualizes.
In conclusion, mental health is a topic that has most definitely gained notoriety in the recent decades, and for good reason. The first step, in resolving a problem is recognizing there is one, and thankfully humanity is on its way to do that exactly. However, that does not mean that there is nothing else left to do. A complete change on how mental health is treated is not fully necessary, but rather the understanding each person has over its own mental wellness.
Works Cited
- Cohen, S., & Janicki-Deverts, D. (2012). Who’s stressed? Distributions of psychological stress in the United States in probability samples from 1983, 2006, and 2009. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42, 1320-1334.
- Lewis ND. American psychiatry from the beginning to World War II. In: Arieti S, editor. American handbook of psychiatry, 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books; 1974. pp. 28–43.
- (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nami.org/blogs/nami-blog/april-2015/changing-the-way-society-understands-mental-health
- World Health Organization. Mental health: report on the second session of the Expert Committee. Geneva: World Health Organization; 1951.
- Webster, Noah. New Collegiate Dictionary. A Merriam-Webster. G. & C. Merriam Co., 1963.