English: Dermatophagia – extreme nail biting / biting of skin to point of an obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or other condition leading to self mutilating behaviour such as autistic spectrum disorders (as is the case in this example) or Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jenkins, Baingana, Ahmad, McDaid and Atun (2011), stated that mental health is the term which is used in a number of different ways. Positive mental health may be conceptualized as including: a positive sense of wellbeing; individual resources including self-esteem, optimism and sense of mastery and coherence; the ability to initiate, develop and sustain mutually satisfying personal relationships; and the ability to cope with adversity (resilience) ( Jenkins et al., 2011). With regards to the authors sentence about positive mental health I will say that negative mental health can then be conceptualized as negative wellbeing; low self-esteem, pessimism, non-coherence and no sense of mastery; inability to initiate, unable to maintain personal relationship or inability to cope up with situations.

Jenkins et al (2011) also states that psychological distress is the most common type of mental health disorder.  Mental health disorder is an ongoing disability resulting in decreased life expectancies.  Mental health treatment faces different types of barriers such as increase in the cost of treatment, social stigma, inability to identify the mental disorder etc.

Mental disorder cannot be judged by looking at the person at one glance. Mental disorders are deep rooted diseases caused by time, circumstances, anxiety, depression and various other factors including the social and emotional wellbeing of an individual. Unlike physical disabilities mental health is also a handicapped and a disabled condition in a life of an individual. A physically disabled person can cause 0.0% damaged as compared to a mentally disabled person.

Severe Mental Illness (Photo credit: homelesshub)

The most likely noted barrier in mental disorder is stigmatization. Mental disorders without creating all the hype should be treated just like the other disorders.  A person with mental disorders is mostly looked upon as an individual who is mentally ill and can cause damage to the society. Stigmatization will unknowingly differentiate a person from the crowd of social and physical group.  This kind of mentally ill individuals starts facing loneliness and hyper anxiety which can cause more damage to the society.

When I was a little girl I saw this movie “Pyscho 3”.  As I was 8 years old, the shadow of this man who is a psycho and kills his mom and roams everywhere with his mom’s hand made me sick. The entire concept made a dead house in my mind that all the psychos tend to end up like this.  What I mean to say is media is the biggest hub promoting ill minded psycho movies which reinforced mentally ill people to react and take down ideas as well.  I certainly do and still believe that movies promoting deadly psychological ill patients killing and murdering people should be stopped completely. Media plays a large role in the lives of people who are more prone to watch it on a daily basis. After watching this kind of movies mental illness can also be expected from the normal individuals. The reason behind this is stress. Stress is a negative force that can make an individual to look at the situation in an entirely different manner.  One must not forget that people are not born with mental disorder but acquires the disorder as time goes by and stress and anxiety starts building up.

A good mental health is a viable and an important goal that should be achieve world-wide.  As stated by Jenkins et al (2011), mental health is just not a disorder but included stress, anxiety, impaired sleep, loss of appetite, obsessive compulsive disorder and many more… Looking around the globe and the present condition of the countries right now, I think it is definitely advisable that mental health should be included in the global health care reform and one of the most important goals to be achieved.

Do you think media plays a role in increasing the anxiety and mental health disorders in normal individual? Do you suggest mental health screening should be included with physical examination or should it be made mandatory?

Thank you,

Sweta

Reference:

Jenkins, R., Baingana, F., Ahmad, R., McDaid, D., & Atun, R. (2011). Mental health and the global agenda: core conceptual issues. Mental Health In Family Medicine, 8(2), 69-82.