Mental Health Issues
A lot of people spend a lot of time and energy debating the relative worth of mental health programs. Unfortunately, with the widespread ignorance of mental health issues, sometimes this debate is only an academic one. According to mental health statistics, a large segment of the mentally ill population never gets the treatment that they need. People with a wide variety of problems ranging from substance abuse to minor depression to acute schizophrenia all suffer the same fate of inconsistent or inadequate treatment resulting in poor quality of life. Better health awareness education is the first step to improving these peoples lives.
I first learned about mental health issues when I was in school. My little sister had a breakdown which caught all of us by surprise. Up until that point, I was ignorant about mental health issues just like any kid in a typical small town. I had seen crazy people in the movies, and had witnessed the town drunk stumbling around and ranting to himself on a few occasions, but I didn’t really understand how real and debilitating mental diseases can be.
Let me tell you, the breakdown my sister had was a wake-up call to everyone in her family, her social group, and her community. Up until she developed her mental health issues, she was an active teenage girls with a lot of friends, and excellent academic record, and a bright future. After things got bad for her, however, she was a shell of her former self. She was coping with some serious demons, and unable to pursue the activities that she had traditionally excelled at.
Fortunately, there was an excellent mental health awareness center in our town that helped my parents decide on the right treatment options. With mental illness problems, there are always a variety of treatment options. Unfortunately, many of them are out of the range of a lot of families to pay. Fortunately, the whole community chipped in and we were able to send my sister to an excellent sanitarium. She made a full recovery while there, and was able to come back in just six months. I think that experience changed her in some ways, and she will never be quite the same. Nevertheless, she has done well with life so far, and has a lot more living to do. With better mental health issue education, hopefully more people can have things turn out as well as they turned out for my sister.
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