Do you, personally, know anyone who has been treated or is being treated for depression? Anxiety?
Hyperactivity? ADD? ADHD? Low self esteem? Insecurity? (Realize that by treated, I don't mean having 'sessions' where they're
allowed to whine for an hour every week to an unlicensed therapist.) If you answered no, I'm willing to bet you're a hermit,
have very few friends, or don't participate in your friends' lives.
Now that we've covered that, how many of your friends need to seek treatment for any of the above 'maladies'?
Know any teenagers? Then your answer is yes 99.9% of the time. I don't consider this a flaw having to do with teens themselves,
but rather the environment and society they are currently raised in. Note: this in no way relieves them of the responsibility
of helping themselves and each other during this turbulent time in life, nor does it relieve them of the requirement to act
in a civil manner.
Know any women? Those are the people leading the complaints of depression, anxiety, stress, low self
esteem, and sleeplessness. Why these complaints? There are currently studies being done by feminist organizations that are
said to show that most women have at least one undiagnosed mental illness that our massively mysoginistic American society
simply ignores. Granted, for every study done, there is another that disagress with it. I'm not sure I agree with these studies,
either, but I find them interesting. Do women face different challenges than men? Society obviously puts different pressures
on the two genders because they are different - would this not lead to different mentalities developing? Is this feminist
take on mental illness simply another effort to be 'equal' when men and women are obviously NOT equal? Ah, that's another
rant - back to the rant at hand:
So, we mentioned teens and we mentioned women. Know any men? There are your leading violent schizophrenics,
mass murderers, pedophiles, rapists, rampage killers and random violence offenders. Why these illnesses? Is it simply modern
man's reaction to being taken out of life? No one is doing a study on this. In my reading I've found that psychologists simply
accept that mass murders and serial murders will be committed by a 26-38 year old while male with a dimminutive job. My question
is: why?
Should there be a distinction between serious mental illness and common mental illness? Are illnesses
drummed up by pharmaceutical companies? Are they caused by the society we live in? Are we simply crying out for attention
in a fast-paced world that doesn't stop for our headaches?
My answer to all of these questions: I dunno. I'll leave it up to a Psych major.
