Society's View Of Mental Illness

7 Pages 1632 Words

Society’s View On Mental Illness

Dictionary.com defines “Mental Illness” as: “Any of various conditions characterized by impairment of an individual's normal cognitive, emotional, or behavioural functioning, and caused by social, psychological, biochemical, genetic, or other factors, such as infection or head trauma.” This definition seems normal enough, seems scientific; but if it is so scientific, if it is common to have a mental illness, then why does society have an “ostrich in the sand” view on mental illness? In other words, society is uncomfortable talking about or accepting mental illness. People constantly turn the other way or refuse to learn about or get to know a person if they have a mental disorder.
First of all, we must ask ourselves: What is crazy? Cuomo and Ronacher (1998) say that people are called mentally healthy when they like their behaviour and that people are considered mentally unhealthy if their behaviour is “unacceptable” or if they don’t like the way that the person acts. Both the common person and psychiatrists judge or diagnose mental illness this way. Macdonald (2003) says that most of the time with mental illness, there is no medical proof, no evidence that there is anything wrong with you. Macdonald has Psychosis and low-grade Schizophrenia. He says that when he was diagnosed with these diseases, he had CAT scans and blood tests, among many other tests, but in actually being diagnosed, all that doctors can do is ask a series of questions to the patient and make a guess based on the responses that they get. Basically, you are diagnosed by opinion and not by actual medicine. He sometimes wonders if there is no suck thing as crazy, maybe some people are different than others, maybe some people see or hear things that other people do not hear, but what they see could possibly be real, just doctors and society refuse to believe that it is real so these disorders have been d...