Mental health illness is something that plagues hundreds of millions of people all around the world on a daily basis, myself and various other people in my life included. Despite this, it is still a topic very much stigmatized transculturally. Recent years have seen the emergence of campaigns, such as StigmaFree, which strive to combat a milieu that prefers silence more often than not when it comes to mental health.
Campaigns like StigmaFree are important. They promote talking about mental health in a way that doesn’t alienate anyone who might have a mental illness. They promote mindfulness; they promote therapy; they promote self-care – and all of these are important. It’s important to get out of your own head sometimes, to talk to a professional about how you’re feeling (RE: a professional; your friends and family are not, nor shouldn’t be your therapists), and to take all of the steps necessary to be the best version of yourself that you possibly can. Mental health campaigns make all of this possible because they normalize mental health illnesses in a way that encourages people to actually talk about what they are going through. This can’t be the end of progress, however.
Though some headway has been made as far as how mental health is treated as a topic in different areas throughout the world, there is still more to be done. Almost anywhere you go, the resources needed for people to effectively improve their mental health are severely lacking in one area or another. For instance, various countries in Europe, as well as Canada, provide free healthcare for all their citizens, meaning that mental health services are affordable for everyone. The drawbacks, however, include a smaller number of practicing mental health professionals, as well as required long waiting periods before a first appointment can be made. The United States has the opposite problem. Mental health professionals are available at every other street corner, and an appointment can be made as soon as it is needed, but health insurance here is based in the private sector. This means if you cannot afford health insurance, or you do not have a job which is able to provide you with those benefits, you will either have to pay for your mental health treatment out of pocket or not receive any treatment at all. It would be beneficial for people all over the world if mental health services were both affordable, and available to everyone.
I think it would also be beneficial if mental health professionals could be integrated into public schools to provide counseling services and mental health education. For young people to have important resources available to them at a time in their lives when they are easily impressionable would be good for them both in the short-term and in the long-run. In the short-term, younger students would have someone available to them, free of charge, in a place where they already legally have to be. Those resources would be readily available to them whenever they might need them (within operating school hours). In the long-run, students would be able to build up their mental health or, at the very least, develop healthy coping mechanisms to use, should they develop mental health illnesses later in their lives.
TL;DR: Talking about mental health so that people who have mental illnesses don’t feel alienated from the rest of the world is great, but just talking isn’t enough. Adequate resources, such as available and affordable mental health services for people of all ages, should be implemented all over the world to give full support to people who have mental illnesses.
Nice reading about your interest in mental healthcare access. I appreciated, too, that you used the affordances of the genre of a blog post. You integrated hyperlinks, used the TL;DR move as something you might see in a blog post (or, a comment).
If you go forward with this on the public school proposal, I would be curious to see if others have tried something like this in the past. And, if so, maybe you target Pittsburgh or Western PA schools for potential curriculum updates or staffing changes. A final notes- you do a good job up front pointing to the landscape surrounding mental health, but I think around paragraph 3 and also in discussion of public school staffing I started to feel like you were making assumptions about other countries, access within US, and what public schools have done or do now. If you continue on, this would be great stuff to research for your Letter to a Classmate assignment coming up.
Looking forward to seeing where you go with all of this!
The topic of mental health is something very close and personal to me. Having an aunt who is diagnosed with many mental illnesses, I see the effects of what you have described first hand. Due to her illnesses she has never been able to hold a job, and thus has no form of income. Your third paragraph perfectly describes the struggle that my family goes through. Since she doesn’t have health insurance, getting help has at time become very difficult. Everyone in my family has always helped out covering costs but constantly being pulled to and from hospitals, appointments, and different institutions quickly adds up.
Campaigns such as StigmaFree are great ways to promote talking about mental health so that everyone feels included, but at times I wish more people knew about programs similar to these. How do you think more people could become aware of programs like these and their benefits?
In reference to your fourth paragraph, when you say public schools, what age level are you referring to? I just wonder because my aunt was diagnosed with her illnesses while she was a college student at NYU. I wonder if she had recourses available to her through her University if she would have been able to cope and receive help more effectively. Since she was not able to receive help at college, she ultimately had to drop out of school.
I appreciate you bringing this issue to light!
Thank you so much for sharing your own experiences with mental health.
These are both really good questions! To address the first, I have to say that I honestly don’t have a clear answer for it. I agree that programs such as StigmaFree should receive more attention, and it would do society as a whole well to know about them. As for how to get the word about these campaigns out there, that’s a little trickier. My first instinct is to say, “use the internet.” Everyone uses the internet, so this would be the most effective way to put a message out there. There is still an issue, though, with the idea of platforming. I, personally, don’t have a very large platform on any of my social media accounts. Because of this, if I were to tweet out a link to the website for one of these campaigns, a few people might click on it and check it out, the tweet might get a few likes and retweets, but beyond my platform, the campaign wouldn’t get much attention.
Another option then, could be to get someone with a larger platform to support these campaigns. If someone with the verified check mark next to their name on Twitter were to tweet out the same link that I did, the campaign would receive considerably more attention. The issue with this, though, is that famous people still have autonomy, despite their fame. They can’t be forced into supporting a campaign or tweeting out a link with the campaign’s information. Some may do this of their own volition (I can think of a few instances where this has happened in the past year), but it is by no means a requirement of their fame. The best option, then, I think, would be for the campaigns themselves to reach out to various media outlets to get stories about what they stand for out into the world. It would require a little more self-promotion, but I think that it would be the most foolproof and efficient way to make sure that people are hearing about these programs.
As for the public schools, I was actually referring to students in middle and high schools (between 6th and 12th grade). These are ages when it starts to become more common (though not guaranteed) for mental health illnesses to kick in. Both the availability of trained mental health professionals for lower income students and the education of how to take care of their mental health would (in my opinion) be very beneficial to them at this particular stage in their lives. My idea was to start education and therapy for mental health at a younger age, so that when the students grow up, they will be better equipped to handle what life throws at them later in life.
I can’t speak for whether or not your aunt had these kinds of resources available to her while she was in university (I’m not sure when she went, nor the history of those resources), but I do know that those resources are available at most universities today. Many states actually legally require that their public universities have these resources available to students. Pitt has a counseling center available to all enrolled students, as well as, I believe, to faculty (I’d need to do a little further research, though, so don’t quote me on this yet).