Short Term 12 Sociology

998 Words2 Pages

Destin Cretton’s film titled, Short Term 12 depicts the struggles of young woman named Grace with a tough exterior and how that exterior slowly disintegrates as she learns to deal with her troubled past. While the former troubled teen learns to come to terms with her past, she works as a supervisor and acts as a guide for troubled teens at an at-risk group home. Furthermore, in analyzing this film from a medical sociological perspective, I will focus on the characters and their experience of being a mental patient. Given there were many characters who were deemed as mentally ill, I will focus my character analyzation on Jayden. In discussing Jayden, I will also compare her experience and the experience of other characters to two of this week’s …show more content…

For example, the character Jayden is a white female from a low social class, and these demographics have an effect on her character. Jayden’s troubles derive from her abusive father. When Jayden begins to act out because of the problems she has at home with her father, she is sent to multiple group homes and is diagnosed as being mentally ill. As mentioned in the reading, a white Non-Hispanic female, is more likely than any other ethnicity group to suffer from mood disorders. Depression is a common mood disorder among women who suffer from chronic stress because they believe they do not have any control over their life. One could assume that Jayden suffered from depression and maybe other mood disorders because of the issues she suffered at home with her father. Like Jayden, many of the other teens suffered from chronic stress due to social problems they faced at home. This film does a great job highlighting how ones social issues give rise to mental …show more content…

Also one’s socioeconomic status plays a big role in whether you overcome that illness, because depending on one’s social class, they may not have the available resources to overcome that illness. Mental illnesses come from the stress we face in our social environment. Short Term 12, demonstrated through characters like Jayden and Grace how hard it is to overcome social problems without support. Many people of a low-social class lack the support needed to overcome mental illnesses. The social stress theory states that our level of stress depends on our social class and that both have a direct effect on whether one develops a mental illness or not. People of a low social class are more likely to develop a mental illness than someone of a higher social class. Those in a lower-social class are more likely to go to jail because they lack the financial support needed to seek professional help. Those that are labeled by doctors as mentally ill only become a label and still have to suffer with being ill. The sociological model states that the medicine given to medicate the problem, could hurt the patient. Moreover, the only way to overcome a mental illness is by dealing with the societal cause of the illness. Short Term 12 illustrated how hard it is for people to overcome social issues, but the movie also demonstrated that it is

More about Short Term 12 Sociology

Open Document