Week 6 - Yiwen Bao

Yiwen Bao

ASA2 A01

Week 6

I found the reading “Pathologizing Everyday Life” by T. Wasserman and L.D. Wasserman interesting. It introduced the medicalization of mental health and commented this to be not always good, especially when over-medicalization occurred. The fact that number of disorders increased a lot—tripled in past two decades in America was pointed out by authors to not only show the status quo of increasingly serious mental illness problems and relations to people’s life, but also concluded the possibility of mis-classification of everyday stress and distress into mental illness. And this is reflecting what the title of this reading is saying. In the last part of the reading, authors discussed about other factors related to mental illness than medicalization, such as personal experience, temperament and social environment. I understand causes of mental illness to be both nature and nurture. After considering and learning about those factors, possible solutions to mental illness could be better developed. 

From my experience, different people respond differently to being recognized as having mental illness. Some people feel sad even mad being diagnosed as having mental disorders. They think they’re right and only different from others. They want the “majority” to consider their ways of thinking, mental status as normal. They don’t want to classified as “disordered”, so most of them usually refuse to take medication and change their mental aspects. However, some young adults in China enjoyed being classified as having some depression. They liked others to think they have more stress and pressure in life and this label of “mental illness” could make them feel unique and cool. Some of my classmates have a good life and actually live better than many others, but whenever they faced some challenges in life or felt unsatisfied with what they earned, they would say they were very down and experienced serious depression. Depression seemed to be an excuse to escapes from improving upset moods and solving problems. The popularity of this idea also affected people who truly have mental problems. One of my friend refused to speak out her mental problems when she truly experienced depression because others might classify her to group of those classmates who pretended to have serious mental problems and over complained about difficulties. Since mental health is not so obvious to define as physical health, and many hospitals don’t have a specific department for mental health, people who have those problems can find it harder to get help. A physically disordered people can be recognized in outlooking and taken care, but it’s much more difficult for mentally disordered ones. People experiencing mental illness might not have ability to describe own situation and symptoms well at the first step. When people have a cold or break their legs, they would undoubtedly listen to doctors and take medication. But coming to mental illness, some would think the problem is not so serious, not worthy money investment. In the last part of reading, the potential to have mental illness due to growing environment and personal experience was emphasized as a factor to diagnosis and understand mental illness. But pointing out this “potential” to a person could also become a hint and message left in his mind that “I may possibly experience mental illness”. I’m not sure if this could increase the possibility of him getting into depression. And when he truly experience problems predicted possible of having, it would only be evidence to prove the expectation and assumption made before. Therefore, mental health is a truly complicated problem, and I see requirement of more research in people’s brains, as a more approachable biological aspect.

Questions:

1. How could telling a person his potential to have mental problems affect his thoughts and possibility of actually experiencing mental illness later? Is the correlation between personal experience and mental illness reliable and should it be told to people in concern? How could we know whether the result is just confirming the assumption or the assumption contributed to lead to the result?
2. How does learning experiences shape people’s biological structures and learning system? We have heard much relations between learning experiences and mental health, and relations between learning system and mental health, then how specifically does learning experiences changed biological aspects of our body which then affects mental health?
3. Is mental illness more a nature or nurture problem?

References:

T. Wasserman, L.D. Wasserman. (2016). Pathologizing Everyday Life. Depathologizing Psychopathology. Retrieved October 29, 2017.

C. Kayla. (2015). Save Your Neighborhood: Learn the Signs of Mental Illness. Retrieved October 29, 2017.

http://truestaris.com/save-your-neighborhood-learn-the-signs-of-mental-illness/