Mental Illness

As C. S. Lewis said “Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also harder to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increase the burden: It is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken”.” A mental illness can be more common than what people think. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), 44.7 million American adults lived with any mental illness (AMI) in 2016, representing 18.3 percent of the country’s adult population (Mental Disorders, Opposing Viewpoints). So many people get diagnosed with a mental illness and every single one of them affects the person in many different ways. There are more types of mental illness than what people know. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which was updated in 2013 and is the standard classification and diagnostic resource used in American psychiatry, includes twenty specific categories of mental disorders.

Examples include disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorders, depressive disorders such as major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD), and trauma- and stressor-related disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Libraries Broward College). Every category of mental illness has a different treatment and all of them need to be taken care carefully. Most of them affect the person performance in life in the same way. Mental illness affects cognitive thinking, performance in school or work, and even the ability to relate to others.

Mental illness affects cognitive thinking. The different disorders start affecting the brain slowly and with time it starts to become worst getting to the point where the person performance in life is not the same.