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Mental Illness In America Essay

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Nearly 1 in 5 Americans deal with Mental Illness. Mental illness is not only something that takes over our mind but controls our physical day to day actions. Anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder,
Schizophrenia are just a few from the long list. To this day there are still so many people that view these symptoms as threating, leaving people who do deal with this to feel shameful and alone. Mental illness is real and needs to be taken seriously.
What is Mental Health stigma? The stigma attached to mental health by society is the detrimental behavior directed towards someone based on their psychiatric label. Through childhood and adult-hood the terms “Crazy” or “insane” are used commonly. Often media will portray people who deal with mental illness as dangerous. These …show more content…

Due to past events mental illnesses such as schizophrenia especially are looked at as dangerous.
“They feel like large groups of people are out to get them, and that they are responsible for making their life miserable”. “We also see that individuals who do this are loners, they’re not trusting, so they don’t have close friendships of social relationships.” This shows how much society looks down at people who suffer of mental illness and the discrimination by teens in school especially.
Mental health should start to be taken seriously in schools by having yearly check-ups for each student by a psychologist to help anyone in need. Giving more attention to people who deal with this will help prevent terrible incidents like school shootings and other violence.
Schools recommend families to pay attention to their child’s behavior and be open about their mental health. But what If the parents are never home, constantly at work, never having a chance to notice anything wrong. Some families may not be able to afford to reach out to

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Although many of these shootings occur every year, there many steps that can be placed in order to prevent them from occurring in the future. Creating gun laws that provide better background checks on the buyer and family can help lessen the chances of a mentally ill person from obtaining a gun. Spreading awareness of a person with a mental illness-or generally spreading information of the many different mental illness- can also help prevent mass murders such as Sandy Hook from occurring. Finally, researching ways to prevent mental illnesses from forming can help prevent these violent crimes. If the blame is on the illness, why not find ways to cease them from affecting more people?

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One in four people is a pretty large ratio. These people could be your family or friends, and the fact that many of them are not able to receive the proper treatment that they require should be alarming. Mental illness affects more lives than one would expect and this epidemic could be easily solved if mental healthcare were to be more accessible. Currently, The United States spends as little $113 billion on mental health treatment. That works out to about 5.6 percent of the national health-care spending, according to a 2011

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