Mental Health Misconceptions

The Symptoms of Mental Illness: Judgment
When someone thinks of a mental facility, they often imagine a grim place filled with people screaming and refusing to take their medications. But, facilities such as the Oregon State Hospital, are beautiful in the interior and exterior. In general, most psychiatric facilities look just like a typical hospital that you’d go to for a broken bone. With these misconceptions, also comes misconceptions of the mental illnesses that brought that person to the facility in the first place. With the misconceptions about mental illness, stigmas have been formed that have negatively affected the lives of those living with them. “Just take pills” or “Just eat” are just two examples of the idiotic solutions people

Just by changing the words used, a sentence can have a completely different tone and image. For example, “A car crashed” sounds more forceful and worse than “A car got hit”, although these two may have the same result. Likewise, this word choice needs to be considered when speaking of someone with a mental illness. In a research study by Ohio State University in Columbus, researchers made two testing group. For one group, they asked whether they agreed with the following statement: the mentally ill should be isolated from the community. In the other testing group, they asked whether they agreed with this following statement: people with mental illnesses should be isolated from the community. As they assumed, the first test group agreed with their given statement than those who were in the second test group (Best Avoid the…). The credibility for such an experiment is still up in the air because it is probable that mostly everyone walked into that room with a certain bias, but for the most part, the findings are used as a pedestal for more looking into the terminology. As reporter Darcy Garnello says, “This isn’t just about saying the right thing for appearances. The language we use has real effects on our levels of tolerance for people with mental illness” (Best Avoid the…). Our views of people, whether affected by mental illnesses or not, has been affected by the language that we use when speaking of them. Additionally, how those with the mental illness view themselves have been greatly affected by the stigmas we, as the society have set up for