Mental Health

Welcome back for another week of discussing the most difficult thing to talk about: mental health! If you have not checked out my other blogs yet, check out MENTAL HEALTH: IS IT A FRAUD? and MENTAL HEALTH: WHY THE STIGMA? for some more information on mental health awareness. In these two blogs, I have discussed how mental health is hard to talk about and how there is such a stigma around having a mental illness. I also talked about how mental disorders develop in your brain. I have also talked about how you need to be careful when researching mental health issues or disorders because there are some untrustworthy websites on the internet that contain extremely false data.

The Internet and Mental Health

Speaking of trustworthy, have you noticed that when you speak about something to a friend, or when you look up something on your phone, there will be an ad for that on your phone within the next minute? It is like your phone is listening to you. I watched a Ted Talk by Jennifer Golbeck who talks about this phenomenon; our phones and technology track our information and they study consistent things we look up, and this helps certain companies with advertising and with tracking our patterns.

This creeps me out when it comes to mental health searches! When people, who are extremely vulnerable, are looking up medications and symptoms in private, someone on the other side is tracking this information to be able to advertise it to them later. This can also be super triggering. If someone with panic disorder is looking up symptoms during an attack, and then later ads on panic attacks come up, that can trigger a panic attack for that person.

Privacy

Next time you are searching something that is potentially triggering, or you want that information to be in private, unfortunately it is just better to go to the doctor and talk to someone in person because you have no more privacy online anymore. Me, personally, how I would address this issue is by not searching up specific questions I have and just call the doctor; I am a very private person and I do not want my mental health questions out in the open for people to track.

To protect my accounts, I won’t use any material that is copyrighted or plagiarized. When I do use other sources to reference data, I always link the website to the creators and quote them in my blogs as well.

My New Social Media Accounts

I do have some new social media accounts you should follow regarding new updates on mental health awareness. I have a Vimeo on how exercise helps with mental health, so go check out that account to see how exercising can help your mental state of mind. I am starting up a Twitter, @mentalhealthru1, and it will consist of facts, statistics, and inspirational quotes to help my mental health awareness train continue to take off. Thanks for reading, and tune in next week.

Here we go again, the elephant in the room: are mental health issues just made-up feelings crazy people have, or is it a real, science-backed problem people face? If you have never dealt with mental health problems, then honestly, I do not blame you for being skeptical because it is hard to believe in something that you cannot “see”. Now with everything online, it is hard to trust certain websites from other to determine what is false and what is not, like if mental disorders are scientifically proven. I found three unreliable sources and three reliable on mental illness that I thought were interesting to read and compare.

For my unreliable, I first found one post on Reddit yesterday, and it was a user saying how he does not believe in most mental disorders because they are just excuses for people to make themselves feel better. Some other people on the same page also said how they feel people use mental disorders as a trend-setter, as it is almost a fun bonding experience. I also found a picture on Tumblr saying, “you do not have a chemical imbalance… you have a brain”, insinuating that mental illness is scientifically false. I read another article from a blog called Return of Kings that stated how women fake mental illness so that they can drink more alcohol, do more drugs, and get more attention. These blogs and posts are unreliable as there is no scientific or accurate data to back up these opinions.

I decided to look up reliable websites regarding mental health. From the National Center for Biotechnology Information, they stated that scientists have concluded that mental disorders can be developed from multiple brain changes, such as its change in its structure or its changes in its chemical makeup. One of the more common mental disorders, bipolar disorder, I decided to look up to learn about its scientific background. From Latuda (an FDA-approved medication for bipolar disorder), bipolar disorder is caused by a decrease in the neurotransmitter serotonin and a fluctuating amount of the neurotransmitter dopamine. These fluctuating amounts of both neurotransmitters causes moods and emotions to go up and down, causing bipolar disorder. Lastly, from WebMD, they explained how mental disorders can be derived from abnormal nerve cell circuits (in the brain) that are not functioning properly, so the neurotransmitters are not communicating properly, leading to mental disorders.

Overall, I am not taking away one thing: mental disorders are not simple and they are very complex. But, as I first compared unreliable sources to reliable sources, you can see how people can write about extremely untrue statements, and when you are trying to look up facts about a topic, credible sources are the best to trust, not social media platforms like Instagram or Tumblr. The best way to determine if sources are reliable is if they are government based, if they are from a science institution, or if they are scientific articles. If you compare the unreliable to the reliable, you can see how the unreliable are from random people on the internet writing opinions, while the reliable are written from doctors or scientists. Also, look at the hyperlinks; if it ends in .gov or .org, those are reliable sources from an organization or the government.

It’s 2020, and we still are having trouble talking about one thing: mental health. I tend to describe mental health as the health of your state of mind. People tend to say, “oh, she is crazy” or,  “wow, he is such a psychopath” in daily commentary. Why is it so hard? Why do we stereotype it so much? Stigmas are very dehumanizing and disrespectful as they create a bias towards a certain characteristic or trait, such as having a mental disorder. As a society, mental health should be taken just as seriously as physical health. Did you know that one in twenty five people have a serious mental illness? Think about your high school class; one person in that math class was, and most likely still is, dealing with a major mental health issue, such as bipolar disorder or severe depression. People daily are battling mental disorders, poor mental health, and much more, and these people are suffering significantly.

There is a stigma towards people with mental health issues. This problem affects anyone, any age, any race, any gender, and any place in the world. A lot get embarrassed to talk about it because they feel that they are “crazy”, and many do not understand what it feels like, so they try to ignore it as well. Also, many think that mental health is a made-up construct and that it is something people can easily fix on their own, versus it actually being a medical issue. People with mental health problems deal with bullying and lack of understanding from people, which can lead to further challenges they have to face. Mental health needs to be talked about more open-mindedly and respectfully; just because people are battling an issue within themselves, versus a visible physical injury, does not mean that there is not a huge battle needing to be faced and conquered. Mental health problems are just as hard to overcome as a physical health problem.