Understanding Mental Health: My Understanding Of Mental Illness

My understanding of the term of mental health is always changing over time by my different personal experiences. My first understanding of mental health is from a term of mental illness, all my previous understandings of mental illness are representing negative things to me, such as fatal and dangerous. There was a story of mental illness I experienced in my childhood and I believed that the story shaped my misunderstanding of mental illness.

In my first 19 years, I grew up in a small town in Northern China. My small hometown was lagging behind than some coastal city, such as Guangzhou and Shanghai, especially in social economy and education. Most of people live in my hometown have strongly stereotypes, for example girl should stay at home

I studied sociology as my major and psychology as my minor in three and half years’ Undergraduate degree in The University of New South Wales. During the studying, I gradually realized that what my previous understandings of mental illness are totally wrong. Based on my recent knowledge about mental illness, people will have different types and levels mental illness but it is a normal disease, it is not same as cancer or other fatal, such as mild depression or severe bipolar disorder. The diagnosis of name of patients’ mental illness will depends on Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)’s diagnostic criteria. Current edition includes more specific explanations of previous mental disorders, which is called DSM-5. I thought I already knew everything about mental health’s theories, experiments and other

I read the client file before I went to meet her. According to her file, she is a singer mother and has a family history of severe depression and she has a 3 year old boy live with her. She asked us to help her to apply a public house. Due to her case that my supervisor and I went to home visit her to get more details about her needs. I thought that would be an easy case to handle it because I have previous knowledge about psychology and mental health. Unfortunately, during the home visit time, she was under depression mood and pushing me to answer her questions rather than answer my prepared questions. My mind was blank and I have no idea how to response and answer her questions at that moment when I realized that situation already off track. Then I have no choice to ask help from my supervisor and let she deal with it. Thus, I failed my first mission in my placement. It is a pity that she is the only one client who has mental illness but I could not help her until I finished my placement in last month. I was thinking why that happened and why I could not use my knowledge to help her. Through my failure case study that I strongly realized that theory is not same as practical experience, and what I learned mental health knowledge is based on the general psychological perspective. I think it will be totally different as what I am studying now.