Mental Health Issues

Mental illness is a social problem because it affect how you socialize with the world.   For instance, anxiety and panic disorders affect your ability to communicate with the world. Social anxiety disorder creates social phobia. With this disorder, you find it hard if not impossible to talk to any one. Typically a person will sit by themselves, withdrawn from society due to their phobia of it. Mental illness is very much a social problem when you consider the repercussions when it is ignored and not treated. For example, a person with severe depression will typically be withdrawn and won't open up about his/her feelings which makes them prone to suicide which is obviously a huge social problem as suicide is one of the largest killers in the world today. Most of the disorders are caused by brain damage or substance abuse and some sort of traumatic life experience.

The families of people with mental health problems tend to find it difficult to deal with and are also affected. Because of this fact there are therapy sessions that are designed to help the family cope with a family member's mental illness. The family members of people with mental illnesses try to help them cope with life, manage meds, and even provide some at home therapy. That is why the Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act was put in place in 1963. This way people with mental health problems stay in their own homes being visited every week by a Community Psychiatric Nurse. As a result, nearly all of the big psychiatric hospitals were torn down and what remains now are small clinics with less beds mainly used for people with severe mental health problems. And the patients that used to be cared for in hospitals are now being ''cared'' for in the community. Unfortunately in a lot of cases this is not helpful for the patient or the community as sometimes their needs are not fully met. And not everyone in the community is sympathetic to people with mental health problems. There are some that...