What symptoms of mental illness did each person display? What made each of these cases different. Contrast these conditions in the context of mental illness versus developmental disabilities. Elyn Saks diagnosis is schizophrenia. Saks began exhibiting periods of disorganization, where she felt as if her mind was falling apart. She first started experiencing this symptom when she was eight years old. By the age of 16, she began to have psychosis. While attending grad school at the University of Oxford, Saks suffered her first official breakdown. Saks now experiences transient psychotic thoughts several times a day; she also has delusions of occasional times where she encounters several days of crazy dreams she cannot push away. However, Saks has not experienced crouching in the corner, shaking and …show more content…
Society sees mental illness as a choice one makes and developmental disability as not a choice. Neither one is a choice. People refer to the mentally ill as crazy. Mental illness is typically associated with people that commit awful crimes, which creates the stigma that people who are mentally ill are dangerous. When it comes to people with developmental disablements, they are referred to, commonly, as unique or slow. Society tends to treat these people like someone that needs more help than others, which is dangerous to people that are mentally ill. What did impact being stigmatized have on their lives? Consider such things as reluctance to seek treatment, living a lie, social isolation and difficulty gaining an accurate diagnosis. Saks’s was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 16-years-old. The diagnosis suggests that she should not be gainfully employed or a contributing factor of society. Instead of letting that hold her back, Saks decided what she can do. She became a professor and wrote a book in 2007. Her book showed that even though she became a successful woman, it did not come without