Both Ethan Watters' "The Americanization of Mental Illness" and New America Media's "On Some College Campuses, A Focus on Asian American Mental Health" provide interesting insight on the stigmatization of mental health. These texts struck me out of the other readings because there was information I both knew and didn't know upon reading.
Watters (2010) writes "When these scientific advances are translated into popular belief and cultural stories, they are often stripped of the complexity of the science and become comically insubstantial narratives." This alone struck me from something Professor Valverde mentioned in class about the use of "big words" in order to explain a concept. When you try to convey a certain message in scientific jargon instead of modern day colloquialism, then you most certainly run the risk of losing the same weight and meaning of your intended tale. This is definitely to say that 'dumbing things down' is beneficial for everyone because if this message is to the people then why is it only targeting a specific group that can understand it?
Another quote that struck me, this time from the News America Media (2013) article was the following: “They don’t want to let anybody down. They don’t want their family to worry, or they don’t think their family is going to understand,” This right here is my own worry because sometimes my own mental health just isn't up to par with everyone else's. And many people my age feel the same way -- they think their families won't understand. In some cases, they will. But other cases, I've seen peers stigmatized for coming out as depressed or anxious; even worse, they'll even be ostracized as the odd one out because there's this incessant need to be neurotypical in Asian households. Although being neurotypical might just be a myth, there is this culture of "normalcy" that is prevalent in households because mental illness is like a plague. It's not welcomed.
I personally think it's great that we're actually discussing mental health, because more often than not it's very taboo. This YouTuber in particular, Akana (2016) is very open about her depression and what it's like to face it. Sometimes she even jokes about it. And I think that if she can express what it's like to have depression and how she's trying to treat it as plainly as she does, then we should have no problem talking about it without so much stigma pertaining to it.
References:
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
Questions:
In what ways can we approach mental illness without "Americanizing" it and without overlooking it? Would it actually be helpful for everyone to go through mental assessments as a norm so it isn't seen as something so 'foreign' or 'wrong'?
No comments:
Post a Comment