Reflective Essay: My Experience With Mental Illness

As I grow older I have learned things about myself that I never thought were possible. Things seem to change with each passing moment and it is sometimes hard to keep up with even myself. Starting graduate school has been one of the biggest decisions in my life and seeing where it takes me over the next two and a half years will be a blast, but I know it wont be without hardships. I will have to discover myself more than ever before, find out what kind of counselor I aspire to be, and how I am going to push myself to get there. As of right now, I already have some biases about certain things and as I grow I am sure I will gain more and lose some that I currently have. At my current day and age, I have beliefs and biases on many different things …show more content…
I believe that mental illness is a case by case bases in that some people are more susceptible to mental illness because it runs in their family while others develop it over time because of their social status, behavior, or abuse they have endured. Mental illness is a disease that is very serious and should not be taken lightly and I believe that even the smallest of cases should be looked at with as much care as someone with a lifelong illness. I am a believer that certain people are stronger about handling their illness than others. While some use their illness as a crutch others use it to grow and better themselves it really all depends on the person with the mental illness and how they handle it. I have a strong bias against people who use their mental illness as a crutch and it makes me not want to help them or hear their …show more content…
However, as I 've gotten older I know its more of a hospital for the mentally unstable; people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe cases of depression. I used to think of the scary movies where people were being abused there but I now know that is not the case. Many people who are not in this field believe that psychiatric hospitals are like jails for the mentally ill but I think in-patient facilities are like that too. I don 't think of it as a jail but more of a holding place for these people to get treatment and get better. Psychiatric hospitals deal more with the doctors and what is really wrong with the person rather than therapy and counseling. I do know that people in psychiatric hospitals are in more need of acute treatment whereas people in in patient facilities do not. Sometime these places are just a holding place until they are ready to send them to a halfway house or in some cases jail. In the facility I work in, some of the children have come from psychiatric hospitals and next they will be going to jail because they are not progressing with treatment. It is a scary reality for some of these