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The Cause Of Stigma Against People With Mental Disorders

By: Gen Wright

It is always difficult when a person close to you is suffering from a mental illness. The condition itself makes it hard for the person to relate to others but what makes it worse is the stigma people with mental disorders receive from society. Though more than a third of the world's population suffers from various psychological disorders, for some reason, a lot of mental patients still get mistreated by supposedly normal people.

Social experts say that this is because not a lot of people receive education regarding the treatment of people with mental disorders. Because only a few people are aware of these certain conditions, most people just resort to using derogatory names such as "crazy" and "nutcase" when referring to people suffering from psychological disorders. Those in the field of mental health responded to this by labeling various disorders. They created names for each psychological disorder and conducted formal studies to have broader knowledge about mental health. They expanded their research and came up with official names for disorders and prescribed certain drugs that could help ease the suffering of mental patients.

While all of these steps were done to help mental patients and these steps did a lot of good in the field of mental health, there are also setbacks that occurred when more and more people continued to study in the field of psychology and psychiatry. Basic psychology was included in the curriculum of some schools so the number of those interested in the field grew by a mile.

However, as the field of psychology and psychiatry continued to expand, so did the stigma. Movies were made featuring stories of mental patients. There were hundreds of novels that revolved around people with disorders and most of the authors of these books often incorporate profound hyperbole in their works. This resulted to exaggerated conceptions of mental patients. Because of these works of fiction, the society has somehow created their own schema or understanding of certain disorders.

The incidents they have read in books and have seen in movies caused them to have an unrealistic generalization of people suffering from psychological conditions. The masses have been made to believe that most mental patients have been known to have caused violence to himself or to other people. This brought about the way of thinking that "crazy people are violent". While this is not the case for most people, there is still a huge number of people who treats mental patients with such disgust that they refuse to even go near them. Discrimination is common especially in educational institutions. Young children with certain disorders do not get the treatment that they deserve as humans. It is bad enough that other students mistreat them but in some cases, even teachers do so as well.

For help regarding problems with mental illness, there are various mental health support centers that could provide apt treatments and other forms of therapies for patients. Therapy is extremely important in recovery because through this, patients can learn that they can also be accepted despite having a psychological condition.

For more information on mental illness, visit the mental health support site.

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