The Algebra of Mental Health
The Algebra of Mental Health
By Janet Jimenez Avalos
As a rising senior I can honestly say that in my past 11 years of schooling I have learned a lot. Well… technically 12 years if you count kindergarten and I do count kindergarten. Nonetheless, I have learned everything that goes from math to science to history and then to more math. Going a little deeper, I’ve learned Pi, the square root of pi and even what keeps the sun from baking us like a pie. All in all, I’ve learned how to count out the exact change when I buy something at Chipotle and how many calories the burrito that I just bought is going to have. What I haven’t learned is how to deal with the anxiety that washes over me when I’m trying to buy said burrito.
As a teenager in today’s society, I can say that there are a lot of my fellow classmates and friends who think they deal with at least one mental illness. I can also swear on the bible that not all my classmates and friends understand what it feels like to deal with that certain type of illnesses. So, how do we, in a close-minded and stereotypical society, go about trying to help out each other with said illnesses? For those of us who already have such an illness, how do we go about dealing with them? Lastly, for those who don’t have anything, how do we make them see that having something like that isn’t a badge of honor?
The stigma of mental disorders and the people that deal with is out there. This stigma is something that we can break and throw away because it impacts the self-esteem of people according to Dr. Bruce G Link and his research. Of course, we can’t all become therapists or psychologists and help the entire world out. However, we can show them that maybe it’s all just in their heads. We can’t bluntly say that one person is healthy and that another one isn’t because the human mind isn’t something that we can describe to be just black and white. There’s a large grey area that we have yet to explore and this is what a Mental Health Class can help with.
Mental health can be a touchy subject seeing as how some people act like having a disorder is something beautiful and tragically poetic. The harsh truth is that there’s nothing poetic about someone with depression and nothing beautiful about someone with anxiety. In most cases, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them. Sometimes it’s just the stress from everyday problems or maybe it’s how some days are a lot more gloomy than others. There can be absolutely nothing wrong with a person but they could create said problems and use them as excuses.