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People understanding mental illness essay
People understanding mental illness essay
Essay on impact of mental illness
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The Lack of General Knowledge about Mental Illness In our world today, we have a generally poor understanding of mental illness in two distinct ways: we don´t understand the dangers that mental illness can present to people as they go about their everyday lives, and we don´t understand how to properly care for people that suffer from mental illness. However, if we better understand when, why, and how mentally ill people can become violent, and if we can better understand how to identify and treat the illnesses these people suffer from, we can drastically improve the lives of many people. People should know more about what some mental ill people can actually do. Some of them might act deviant and break informal social rules. For example, when a person suffers from schizophrenia randomly talks in places where he is supposed to be quiet because of his imaginations. Moreover, some mental ill are just crazy and they commit big crimes breaking the law, school shootings or at public places. According to an article written by Adam Peck “2014 is off to a deadly start: in the first 14 school days of the year, there have been at least seven school shootings. For sake of comparison, there were 28 school shootings in all of 2013, according to gun violence prevention group Moms Demand Action” (Peck, 1014). These tragedies look unprovable to affect a friend or a family member, but statistics actually show this happens way too often around the country. Most of the people do not realize the magnitude of the situation until they affect themselves or someone they care about. Laws can punish these kind of criminals, but they do not compensate the families and friends that have been affected. Mental ill people should probably have some restrictions a... ... middle of paper ... ...e attitudes other people have toward them can be the cause that makes them act deviant. If this is true, everything wrong mental ill people do is caused by our society. Therefore, it would make sense if the society paid some costs in terms of taxes of what they have created. To sum up, I feel like our society is poor in comprehending how mental ill people can dramatically change our lives if they have a bad day and how to help people that suffer from a mental health problem. I believe that we can improve a lot of lives if we obtain a better understanding about this topic. Every member of society and the government should put more effort in providing treatment for the mental ill. A lot of citizens and members of the government realize something has to change about his situation, but it looks like neither of them is going to make a decisive action in the near future.
In the book Crazy in America by Mary Beth Pfeiffer, she illustrated examples of what people with mental illness endure every day in their encounters with the criminal justice system. Shayne Eggen, Peter Nadir, Alan Houseman and Joseph Maldonado are amongst those thousands or more people who are view as suspected when in reality they are psychotic who should be receiving medical assistance instead, of been thrown into prison. Their stories also show how our society has failed to provide some of its most vulnerable citizens and has allowed them to be treated as a criminals. All of these people shared a common similarity which is their experience they went through due to their illness.
When such bad behavior is exhibited, even though it is due to a mental illness, it often can make people unwilling to help because they are so difficult to deal with. They just see the simplest option is to lock them up or put them in segregation, which does not do any good to the individual suffering from the mental illness. What is also not often considered is that 98% of inmates do get released back into the public. When they do not get adequate help for their mental health issues, they often cause problems when they are released and end up back in jail or prison. Inmates on medication while in the institution are only given two weeks’ worth of that medication when released, but it often takes around three months to get an appointment to see a doctor to receive more, which contributes to the
Continuing budget cuts on mental health care create negative and detrimental impacts on society due to increased improper care for mentally ill, public violence, and overcrowding in jails and emergency rooms. Origins, of mental health as people know it today, began in 1908. The movement initiated was known as “mental hygiene”, which was defined as referring to all things preserving mental health, including maintaining harmonious relation with others, and to participate in constructive changes in one’s social and physical environment (Bertolote 1). As a result of the current spending cuts approaching mental health care, proper treatment has declined drastically. The expanse of improper care to mentally ill peoples has elevated harmful threats of heightened public violence to society.
Mental illness affects one in four adults every year ("NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness | Mental Illnesses"). Mental illness effects thousands who may not even be aware of it. Many who are aware do not receive treatment until something bad happens in result of not receiving treatment. These illnesses affect all aspects of the person’s life. They often do things without the knowledge of what they are doing. Many people who do have these illness commit crimes without the knowledge of the fact that they are doing wrong. People often do not believe that having a mental illness gives people the right to commit a crime, and it doesn’t. It merely suggests that the person who committed said crime was not aware of their actions therefore cannot be held accountable for the wrongdoing. Families of the victims usually are oblivious to what mental illness is and own they do end up educating themselves wondering why these people never got help so their loved one may have been spared. Mentally ill persons should be exempt from the death penalty because they are in a questionable state of mind, they will become low risk if they receive treatment, and the families of the victims do not want them to receive the death penalty.
Markowitz, F. E. (2011). Mental illness, crime, and violence: Risk, context, and social control. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 36-44.
The discussion of mental health is slowly being brought to the social surface to create a more inclusive society for those dealing with a mental illness. However, those with a mental illness are continuously being affected by stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination by those who simply don’t comprehend the complexity of the human brain (Glaser, G.2017). As more people become mental health activist, they are exposing the plethora of issues surrounding the overall mental and physical stability of those who are negatively affected by the social construct of what it means to be normal.
If we go easy on them and set them free because they have a mental disorder, they can be a danger to society. For example, Micheal Fisher, who was accused of attempting to abduct a boy from a sports arena in Victoriaville. He was ultimately not found guilty due to mental illness,yet four years later there he is trying to commit the same crime again. It is people like him the reason why we should punish mentally ill offenders with incarceration. People, no matter if mentally disabled or not should be punished equally under the law. That's what it says on the American declaration of independence “...all men are created equal.”. Meaning, we are being fair in placing them in prison. If we put them in a mental institution, they will not listen. For example the attack on Jill Francis, a psychiatric technician who was punched by one of her patients. Even months after the incident, there's still a bruise under her left eye from reconstructive surgery. The person who punched her was Desmond Watkins, who has been previously imprison for assault with a deadly weapon. Francis said that Watkins “..just got fixated all of a sudden that he wanted to go back to prison, and that by hitting someone that would enable him to go back”.This shows that mentally ill offenders are dangerous and unpredictable, and should not be release or treated, but
This paper will view some of the characteristics and violent behavior risk factors associated with a depressed or mentally ill person. It will also, compare characteristic that characterize a person suffering form depression or a person that is mentally ill. This paper will discuss treatment or punishment debated concerning depression and mental illness in the justice system. Existing studies will be used to help in the study of depression and mental illness from different sources. Depression and Violence Depression, according to Webster (1988), is a psychotic condition marked by an inability to concentrate and feelings of dejection and quilt."(p.364) Depression is most commonly treatable with counseling, but what happens when counseling fail? Although our current mental health system is not perfect it has been able to bring us where we are today.
It is evident that those with mental illnesses have an increased likelihood of committing crimes. It is important to note, however, that not all people with mental illnesses commit crimes or violent behavior so a cause is not evident. Substance abuse, a mental disorder, is also seen as a large risk in violent behavior (Silver 2006). Hiday (1995) asks the questions of the direction of this correlation. Does mental illness lead to violence or is it vice versa?
Glied, S., & Frank, R. G. (2014). Mental Illness and Violence: Lessons From the Evidence.
We as a society have been forced to think that everyone in jail deserves what they get, we over look the fact that some have a mental illness that they can’t control over their actions .Taken all we have learned, this information has let me see what goes on, not only in jail, but in society. In this article it talks about people who have mental illness being treated improperly in jail and the rate of suicides is high do to the fact that people are not able to care for himself and feel that they do not belong there. When looking at videos in class I was able to understand why some people do what, some people hurt others and themselves without their control. The main issue of the article is that people with mental illnesses are being sent to jail for crimes that they may not have control over as they are sent to jail they are treated inappropriate by other inmates and guards that don't know how to handle them. The fact that some inmates ha...
Today’s headlines are often filled with the tragedy of a life or lives taken by gun violence. The American people have cried out to their leaders that enough is enough and something must be done to prevent such tragedies from continuing. The Governments solution is to call for health care reform pertaining to patients who suffer from mental health issues like schizophrenia or psychosis. However, the passing of HIPA has caused confusion among the states as well as the actual definition of mental health. Also many criminologists, psychologists, and forensic psychologists state that no psychologist or therapist can predict which patients will harm others and who will not. Instead of focusing on a path that will not help curb gun violence
According to the article “overrepresentation of people with mental illness in the criminal justice system is often referred to as the “criminalization” of mental illness” (CAMH, 2013). Despite the large rate of individuals with mental illness there still continues to be stigma that has given the public a perception of a widespread of fear, misunderstanding and a belief that these specific individuals are dangerous criminals. According to an article by Fred E. Markowitz titled “Mental illness, crime, and violence: Risk, context, and social control” a survey that was conducted asking the public what the term mentally ill meant to them, the results showed that Americans had a slurred perception of the mentally ill population. The majority of the public associated mental illness with psychosis (Markowitz, F, 2010, Mental illness, crime, and violence: Risk, context, and social control, 38) “Respondents indicated that mental illness means that persons are not in touch with reality or live in their own world. Respondents also used colloquial terms such as “nuts,” “deranged,” or “out of
Mass media “references to people with mental health problems found more than four in ten articles in the press used derogatory terms about mental health and nearly half of press coverage related mental illness to violence and crime” (Esseler, 244). This is causing for people to look down upon the mention of mental illnesses and many times ignore the importance of confronting this issue. Therefore the importance of removing this stigmatization is crucial. Education allows to make more informed decisions and then changing the perception of mental illness can lead towards policy changes toward the improvement of mental health (Sakellari,
With so many inaccurate an unfair public perceptions to individuals with a mental illness may be responsible for the violent crimes being committed in neighborhoods and all around the world. When a violent crime has been committed the media will always link it to a person being mentally ill. Which can be damaging to the people who really suffer from a mental illness. They may be to embarrass to seek medical care, causing a fear of them being judged. Others may not really care on the person’s wellbeing and think that all people who commit violent crimes should be considered with having some type of mental illness