Week 6

Vince Olanda

Week 6

ASA 002

912845780

For this week’s reading, ‘The Americanization of Mental Illness,’ the topic was very interesting to me. For me personally, growing up I was never one to associate myself as an individual that needed to worry about the topic of mental illness. Being a sheltered military child, I was never exposed to people who were afflicted with them as well. However, as I was introduced to these foreign concepts, my perspective on the situation changed. I was completely open-minded to the fact that they had these problems, and I clearly had no intention of invalidating them, so instead I accepted and believed in everyone’s claims when they said they had one. However, reading through this article offered a different, more contrasting point of view. It basically highlighted the fact that diagnoses of mental illness are very ambiguous and old-fashioned. In result, anyone can claim that they have a mental illness to a medical hospital, and in result be prescribed medicine for their respective illnesses. Although this isn’t necessarily a bad concept, this is also fairly easy to abuse to people who just desire the medicine for personal benefit. A person who doesn’t have a mental illness can just claim to be afflicted and a victim of a mental illness to receive medical benefits. This topic in itself is very fragile and I'm curious to explore more ways in how to approach it as well as developing potential solutions to solving it.

This has been a very ambiguous topic to read about, and this picture depicts the depth of mental illness and how easy it is to claim to have one.

Questions: Where do we draw the line between having a mental illness and not having one? Should we discredit those who claim they do when they actually don't, and how do we approach that situation?

References: Previous mental illness diagnosis and other health problems. (2016, May 04). Retrieved May 07, 2017, from https://moodspectrumreview.wordpress.com/2015/06/13/previous-mental-illness-diagnosis-and-other-health-problems/