Week 6: Annie Deng, A01

Annie Deng
Section A01
Week 6

     Mental illness is being defined in a more broader and general way. The degrees to how people react to mental distress are considered when diagnosing mental disorders, but people are now expanding the boundaries used to diagnoses these illnesses (Wasserman, T., & Wasserman, 2016). Suddenly, mental health and mental illness is becoming a new rising phenomenon. People are being fed with new information. Therefore, more people are consciously or subconsciously being diagnosed with all sorts of mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, and OCD. Honestly, the problem lies in the over-medicalization of mental illnesses. Organizations, corporations, and big industries ultimately want to make profit, so categorizing everyday stresses and struggles as an illness will make a huge population considered to be "mentally ill," attracting more patients to treat. I also learned in my psychology class that there are several categories of mental disorders and then there were sub-disorders. I questioned all these categories because the over-medicalization practically assumes nearly everyone has some sort of mental illness, which cannot be right. Something that used to affect a small portion of the world is now suddenly dominating a huge part of it. Distress and suffering is now being accepted as a norm for medically diagnosed illnesses. Society has started to corporatize even mental health when it is not even necessary. 

I also found it intriguing when people reacted negatively to patients who had a mental disorder due to biological problems and how people reacted better to patients who had a mental disorder because of something that happened to them in the past. It made me wonder how there will always be differing perspectives on how people see mental illness. 

      Western globalization of mental health has also affected many cultures and the way everyone perceives mental illness. Because of this spread of western knowledge, more people are constantly being diagnosed as mentally ill. As the world is exposed to the conventional western diagnostics of mental illness, people are subconsciously developing mental disorders. The americanization of mental illness is spreading rapidly, making the world believe that western knowledge holds all the right truths. It is almost like western mental imperialism. 

Question: Why are we creating a system that increasingly manifests mental illnesses instead of actually focusing on how to truly heal the minds of people?



References

• On Some College Campuses, A Focus On Asian American Mental Health. (2013, September 11). News America Media. Retrieved from http://newamericamedia.org/2013/09/on-some-college-campuses-a-focus-on-asian-american-mental-health.php
• Wasserman, T., & Wasserman, L. D. (2016). Depathologizing psychopathology: the neuroscience of mental illness and its treatment. Switzerland: Springer.
• Watters, E. (2010, January 8). The Americanization of Mental Illness. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html
• Watters, E. Crazy Like Us. Digital image. N.p., 12 Jan. 2010. Web.