The Effects Of Mental Health And Mental Illness

First of all, how is the social perception of mental illness determining the reaction of people and how they treat people with this problem?

A lot of us confuse the terms mental health, and mental illness. Sometimes mental health is used to describe issues that are mental illness. Even though the two of them relate to the mental state of a person, they are different and represent different psychological conditions. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Mental health is, a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to contribute to his or her community.” Mental illness is defined as, “collectively

Sometimes mental illness is one of the explanations that people propose as a cause for this crimes as they are not able to understand how an individual can commit such heinous crimes. Some of the most notorious and resent cases of mass killings in the United States have been; James Holmes who killed 12 moviegoers in Colorado, Adam Lanza who killed 26 children and a teacher in Pennsylvania, and Dylann Roof that killed nine people that were having bible study in a church. The public and the media assumed in the beginning, before any proof was presented, that the shooters had mental illnesses. According to James Alan Fox and Emma Fridel (2016), “just 15 percent of the assailants had a psychotic disorder, and 11 percent had paranoid schizophrenia”. Other studies have come to a higher estimate, suggesting about 23 percent of mass killers are mentally ill. It is sad to say that people with mental illnesses are a vulnerable population because there is a public stigma regarding mental illness. These cases of mass shootings, killings, and violence that are blamed on individuals that are suspected to suffer from mental illnesses are perpetuating the stigma and fear that people

Erving Goffman (1961) says, “upon release from the hospital, an individual’s social position on the outside will never again be quite what it was prior to entrance, because the total institution bestows an unfavorable status” (p. 72). One of the problems affecting people with mental illness is “Social Distancing,” as described by Michael Friedman (2014) as “whereby people with mental issues are more isolated from others.” The stigma of mental illness is making us sicker, creating lack of opportunities for help and for social engagement. According to the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health