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7-1 Final Project Part One Submission: Critical Analysis Portfolio

7-1 Final Project Part One Submission: Critical Analysis Portfolio Laquesha Walker Southern New Hampshire University

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Introduction What is mental health? Mental health includes the emotional, psychological, and social well-being. “It affects how we think, feel, and act as we cope with life. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood and aging” (Mental-health, 2021). A state of well-being is when an individual realizes his/her potential, while also coping with the normal stress that life brings, working normally, and contributing to their community. Mental health definitely has an impact in every aspect of our life and in our society. Since we have different values, views on life, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds. This alone can alter our understanding of mental health and the people who constantly deal with it on a daily basis. Mental health disorders can anyone in our family and it can affect our friends as well, no matter the different viewpoints we may have on any issues regarding life and the many events that occur daily. I will now talk about my topic on mental health through all four of the four general education lenses, which are the lens of history, lens of humanities, lens of natural and applied sciences, and the lens of social sciences. Lens of history For much of history, men, women, and children, who were mentally ill was treated horribly. In the past mental illness was seen as demonic. Such as demonic possession, witchcraft. So, if anyone would have behaved abnormally, they would be considered to be a sign of demonic possession. If anyone were considered to be possessed, different types of treatment would be done to remove the spirits from the individual. Exorcism is a well-known treatment for removing any evil spirits from the body, by a priest. Another form of treatment for severe cases of mental illnesses was called trephining, which is when a small whole is drilled in skull of the individual

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to release spirits from the body. Almost anyone who had gone under this procedure has died. Also, people with psychological disorders that went through both of the treatments or other practices involved imprisonment or execution. Others were left homeless, misunderstood, and treated badly. In the 1400s to the late 1600s, religious organizations believed that people who were mentally ill made packs with evil spirits. They were considered witches and tried, condemned by the court, and burned at the stake. “Worldwide, it is estimated that tens of thousands of mentally ill people were killed after being accused of being witches or under the influence of witchcraft” (Hemphill, 1966). In the 18th century, people who were considered odd or unusual were placed in asylums. Asylums were the first institutions for taking in people with psychological disorders. The rooms inside of the asylums did not have windows, they were chained to their beds, beaten, and they really did not have any contact with the caregivers. “According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2013), 19% of U.S. adults experienced mental illness in 2012. For teens (ages 13–18), the rate is similar to that of adults, and for children ages 8–15, current estimates suggest that 13% experience mental illness in a given year (National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH], n.d.-a). According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), in 2008, 13.4% of adults received treatment for a mental health issue (NIMH, n.d.-b). These percentages, shown reflect the number of adults who received care in inpatient and outpatient settings and/or used prescription medication for psychological disorders” (Lumen, 2021). Today there are many mental health centers within the communities across the world. Due to the system not being set up properly, some of the centers had to unfortunately close down because they were underfunded. “The staff wasn’t trained properly to deal with severe cases of

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mental illnesses. Statistics show that 26% of homeless adults living in shelters experience mental illness” (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD], 2011). The Center of Disease Control and Preventions National health and Nutrition Examination found that 50.6% of children who has mental disorders had received treatment within the past year. Today there are psychiatric hospitals instead of asylums, the state government, and hospitals in local communities, who allow patients to stay for a short time. Unfortunately, not everyone who has mental disorders are being hospitalized. You can now speak to your physician and they would normally make an appoint with someone who specializes in therapy. Through the historical lens, we are educated on the deinstitutionalization of mental health and the implementation of community-based mental health care which brought mental illness into the public. Through historical lens, mental illness has always been demonized and not taken seriously, and people who had this illness were seen as evil instead of people who needed help. Lens of humanities The media is by far the top influence on why mental illness is looked at as being demonic and evil, these are the perceptions that the public has on mental health through the media. People have many ways to get connected to the media and it is everywhere, the impact that the media has on the people across the world is incredible, but also kind of scary. Because, either it is having a positive impact on the event, issue, and or person, or it has the most negative impact with horrible backlash from the event, issue, and or person. This is how mental health is connected to humanities, it can be an education lens as well for many people across the world. Good or bad media it changes our understanding of mental health and our understanding of people in general.

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The harsh implications for those who suffer from mental illness is worthy of attention because mental illness is continuously shown in a negative and sometimes inaccurate way in the media, but I do believe if the media is willingly to stress the importance of mental health. The message will get out to the public in a more positive image. “An analysis of media content in April 1993 found that two-thirds of items dealing with mental health issues forged a link between mental illness and violence. Using some of this material, the impact on the beliefs of an audience sample was explored. Six general groups and one user group took part in the study. Two-fifths of the general sample believed mental illness to be associated with violence and gave the media as their source. While some respondents with personal knowledge of mental illness, including the user group, rejected the dominant media message, others accepted it against the evidence of their own eyes. The findings indicate the importance of working with the media to destigmatize mental health problems” (Philo, 1994). Lens of the natural and applied sciences The natural and applied science lens is connected to the improved and advance treatments and systems in clinical science, over the course of the years. From the past to the present, treatments for the mentally ill has improved from harsh and deadly to now speaking and talking about feelings and trying to get to the bottom of what is going on. The diagnosing process and treatments have improved, there are numerous centers instead of asylums, and many people have access to strong and evidence based mental health interventions. “Diagnosing mental-health issues may seem straightforward: Patients discuss their symptoms, and a clinician matches those symptoms to a disorder and devises an appropriate treatment. In reality, this view belies the complexity inherent in understanding, classifying, and diagnosing psychiatric phenomena. Advances in clinical science over the past several decades have led to major improvements in

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how mental disorder is diagnosed and treated—millions of individuals now have access to robust, evidence-based interventions. But as science reveals more about the origins and development of mental disorder, it also raises more questions.” (Appelbaum, 2017). Lens of the social sciences The social science lens sheds light on the implications that mental health has on society and on the economic cost for days absent from work, excused absences, sick time, family, and medical leave, isolation from the world and close friends and family. “90% of the nation’s $3.5 trillion in annual health care expenditures are for people with chronic and mental health conditions” (CDC, 2020). Some of the things that cause triggers mental are childhood abuse, trauma, or neglect, social isolation, or loneliness, experiencing discrimination and stigma, social disadvantage, poverty or debt, bereavement (losing someone close to you), severe or long-term stress, having a long-term physical health condition, and unemployment or losing your job. Having supportive and loving family and friend there to help in your time of need can do a lot for someone who feels alone in the world. Having political influence, influences people to have interventions and set policies that can push the message psychological wellbeing and social interactions with two or more people. Analyze your issue/event through the lens of history Mental illness will always have an impact on social issues and society. These issues can start at home, at a job, losing a job, poverty, school, and social isolation. While I was researching, it became clear that people with mental illness cannot take care of themselves at all and even if they could it would be a struggle each day. They cannot contribute to society the same way as people without mental illness can. Because, of this issue, many issues are impacted by the mentally ill. Like for example poverty.

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Poverty and mental illness have a connection to one another, meaning that the more people within a society that suffers from mental illness increases the poverty level. This only because people with mental illness in poverty really do not have the resources or connections to be properly taken care of and they cannot take care of themselves also. So, they are in a space where the odds are stacked against them. “Poverty affects mental health through an array of social and biological mechanisms acting at multiple levels, including individuals, families, local communities, and nations. Individual-level mediators in the relationship between poverty and mental health include financial stress, chronic and acute stressful life events exposure, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis changes, other brain circuit changes (language processing, executive functioning), poor prenatal health and birth outcomes, inadequate nutrition, and toxin exposure (lead). Family-level mediators include parental relationship stress, parental psychopathology (especially depression), low parental warmth or investment, hostile and inconsistent parenting, low-stimulation home environments, and child abuse and neglect” (Simon et al., 2018). The history lens helps us understand the many social issues that are related to mental illness, because it will give us an insight on how these social issues will become better over the years or if it will get worser over the years. Either way, understanding these social issues, through the history lens gives us a chance to find, correct, and learn from the past issues and mistakes. Taking all of these things to create something that can help people with mental illness get the best treatments, resources, and connections that they would need in order to get help. Looking at things like this through the history lens can help you find and identify things that could work and find things that never worked to help people with mental illness get treated properly. Poverty and mental illness affected society’s poverty level heavily. People who struggle

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with mental illness, while living in harsh environments that does not have the proper resources, treatment, and connection to help them in any way, while struggling mentally is really hard to cope with. Learning from these types of events and issues from the past can help connect and discover new ways to construct a plan that can help push positive changes for the future, that are needed to help men, women, and children who have mental illness and who live-in povertystricken areas. This lens will provide credible information about the issue/ event and can help deeper the understanding of the issue. Analyze your issue/event through the lens of the humanities Mental illness has an unpleasant stigma attached to it, which can be displayed like this in movies, art, literature, and music. Mental illness is displayed more in a dark, violent, and scary way. In art its always sad, depressed, and miserable people or objects in a dark background or setting. People who have mental illness are very misunderstood by society, often shunned from society as well, and are seen as homeless or a schizophrenic person. Let us talk about the joker movie for example. He was a man who had a condition where he would laugh uncontrollably (Pseudobulbar affect), and many people would get uncomfortable around him or even to physically harm him. He then found out that he would not be able to continue getting his medication because they closed down the clinic who supplied it to him, they completely cut him off his medication, because of budget cuts. While also being treated horribly by the people around him continuously he finally snapped and end up killing people who treated him horribly and he even had erotomaniac delusions about a relationship with another woman. He lived in a poverty-stricken area and after being cut off from his medication he became violent, because his mental health had declined. This stereotype that people with mental illness will be brought down a path of violence, which is not always true. According to the U.S.

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Department of Health and Human Services, only 3% to 5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with serious mental illness (2017). The massage of this type of representation is that people who have mental illness are considered bad, dangerous, and not all there in the head, but this pushes people who want help away because, this is the stereotyped that is stuck with anything related to mental illness and they don’t want to be persecuted by their loved ones and society, not everyone has that kind of support or people who are willing to stick by them to the very end. “It helps to foster an extreme bias and prejudice against the mentally ill. Society often blames the patient for their mental illness, attributing it to something they have done wrong or the poverty level in which they exist’ (Rubino, 2019). It would be terrifying for a person with mental illness to let anyone that they are unfamiliar with in such a personal and vulnerable part of their life. They would be even more terrified being taken away from a familiar place like home, to be brought into a facility for the mentally ill. Situations like this can be shameful to some, some people would not think that anything was wrong with them, and some people would be scared to speak about it. Mental illness is a common problem across the world, everyone can experience mental health issues in any part of their life, mental health does not discriminate against anyone’s age, gender, or sexuality. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 out of 5 Americans will experience mental health issue every year (CDC, 2018). The harmful stereotypes that many people associate mental health with has made it very difficult for the people who are affected by mental illness and this is why many of them cannot speak up about them battling mental illness, because mental illness has been demonized by society. Society has treated mental health issues as if it something that people can overcome if they just try harder or snap out of it,

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and it is not that simple. For many people they fear of what society will think of them and their personal perceptions of people with mental illness is, and it may affect their standard of health, comfort, and happiness. It is through the lens of natural science that social communication can be started. A way to improve mental health is to practice interacting with others and nature. According to Gretchen Daily, who is the faculty director at the Stanford Natural Capital Project states that “The nature experience is associated with increased happiness, social engagement, and manageability of life tasks, and decreased mental distress linking the many dimensions of human experience with a greater sense of meaning and purpose in life” (Daily, 2019). There are many health technologies that focus on physical wellness, technology can in fact offer new ways to help manage mental wellness. The applied science can provide a way for many people to enhance their understanding of mental health, while enhancing their access to mental wellness tools. Like for example smartphone apps that offer numerous meditation and visualizations tools can be accessed through the app daily, no matter where you are in the world. Also, SAMHSA has a national hotline for individuals and families facing mental/ substance use disorders. They also have 24/7, 365 day-ayear treatment referral and information service. Alcoholics Anonymous also has a 12- step app that follows each individual’s progress in the program, and for those who are managing alcohol addiction. This will provide the user quick access to important information to help them continue their path to sobriety. Mental health has impacted majority of all of the aspects of our society. When the needs of people who have mental health issues needs are met, then the communities will thrive. But, when the issue of mental health is unaddressed, it can become more severe each day and soon the

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severity of mental health will have a negative influence on the communities. According to the CDC, “90% of the nation’s $3.5 trillion annual health care expenditures are for people with chronic and mental health conditions” (CDC, 2018). Also, the science lens helps us clearly understand socioeconomic issues on a deeper level. Like for example, “According to a 2015 assessment by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 564,708 people were homeless on a given night in the United States. At a minimum, 140,000 or 25 percent of these people were seriously mentally ill, and 250,000 or 45 percent had any mental illness. By comparison, a 2016 study found that 4.2 percent of U.S. adults have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness” (BBR, 2020). The homeless population has mental health issues, and this does have a negative impact on employment and businesses through staying away from low productivity, profits, and poor employee morale. Conclusion In concluding, suffering from mental illness is more common than many people think. Mental illness is what we can all experience at least once in our lifetime. To understand clearly, we can talk about statistics. According to WHO, more than 300 million people nationwide suffe...