Discrimination In Brandon Buckley's Argumentative Essay

In a rural Indiana town, a 16-year-old high school student by the name of Brandon Buckley has not been attending school recently. His absences have really started to accumulate, reaching the double digits while simultaneously catching the attention to the school administration. When contacting Brandon’s mother to get to inform her of her son’s frequent absences, the school learns that Mrs. Buckley is well aware. She informs the high school principle that Brandon has recently been diagnosed with clinical depression, which often makes it difficult for him to do the simple, mundane life tasks which most take for granted, including attending school. Despite submitting the proper documentation from Brandon’s therapist and doctor, the school corporation

Whether it be in an academic setting as with the case of Brandon, or in an occupational or medical establishment, the mentally ill are not adequately protected from discrimination by current legislation, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), nor are they receiving the proper accommodations. This issue is important on a variety of levels, since it has the capacity to strike a helpless victim – whether it be our child, spouse, close friend, coworkers, or even our self. In fact, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), “Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. – 43.8 million, or 18.5% – experiences mental illness in a given year.” The human psyche remains a complex, resilient entity. However, certain cases involving extenuating life circumstances, genetic predisposition, physical causation, or a combination of these factors, may trigger the onset of mental illness. While some are more predisposed to onset than others, mental illness possesses the capacity to strike a victim of any gender, socio-economic status, age, or race, at any given time. It is essential that constituents of the academic, occupational, and medical establishments recognize and seek to understand mental illness so that the sufferers found in these places are no longer forced to agonize in silence and are

The origins of the word, “stigma” are Greek, meaning “mark,” often to designate “a mark of disgrace or infamy, which leads to action: discrimination against the stigmatized person,” according to Dr. Juan J. Lopez-Ibor Jr., Department for Psychiatry and Medical Psychology, Faculty of Medicine from Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. Once stigma makes its mark, it often remains attached to the perception of an individual forever. In fact, attempts to eradicate the stigma only draw further attention to it (Lopez-Ibor). This stigma associated with mental illness often times creates a shameful attitude toward the subject matter, going so far as to assign a number of incorrect and insensitive labels to the mentally ill. As with the case of Brandon Buckley, the side effects of his depression rendered him “lazy” in the eyes of the attendance court. Other popular labels given to the mentally ill include most often include: “dramatic,” “unstable,” and “sensitive.” In actuality, a mental illness is an honest medical condition, simply not attributed to character flaws, such as slothfulness or being overly