In the summer of 2014, I picked up a book that changed my life forever.
I was always a curious child. I’d ask my mother what were the little things that made her happy, I’d ask my father what he thought about himself when he was my age, I asked my sister if she had her future all planned out and I asked my friends if the rustling of leaving on a windy evening made them as happy as it made me. As I grew up, my questions changed, but my endless need to understand the world and the people in it more deeply, didn’t.
It wasn’t until I read the Unquiet Mind but Kay Redfield Jamison, a stunning memoir of a clinical psychologist in dealing with her own manic depressive illness, that I realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life finding answers to questions and studying people, by …show more content…
More so, people suffering from psychological disorders are stigmatized, trivialized, simply ignored or condemned to suffer alone for they lack social support due to the stigma attached to their illness. Moreover, over the past decade or so, it’s become commonplace to use mental disorder phraseology to describe common often trivial situations or problems and terms like “depressed”, “OCD”, “bipolar” have become integrated into our everyday vocabulary. This is extremely harmful because it is belittling to those who suffer from very real illnesses and this attitude invokes a sense of shame to those who want to seek help.
Thus, as a Psychology student and as a member of society, I aim to bridge the gap that exists between how society perceives a mental illness and the reality faced by those who experience it. I want to gain a comprehensive understanding about how these disorders affect the people suffering from them and use that information to transform the deep rooted stigma that exists in society about such
I was always a curious child. I’d ask my mother what were the little things that made her happy, I’d ask my father what he thought about himself when he was my age, I asked my sister if she had her future all planned out and I asked my friends if the rustling of leaving on a windy evening made them as happy as it made me. As I grew up, my questions changed, but my endless need to understand the world and the people in it more deeply, didn’t.
It wasn’t until I read the Unquiet Mind but Kay Redfield Jamison, a stunning memoir of a clinical psychologist in dealing with her own manic depressive illness, that I realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life finding answers to questions and studying people, by …show more content…
More so, people suffering from psychological disorders are stigmatized, trivialized, simply ignored or condemned to suffer alone for they lack social support due to the stigma attached to their illness. Moreover, over the past decade or so, it’s become commonplace to use mental disorder phraseology to describe common often trivial situations or problems and terms like “depressed”, “OCD”, “bipolar” have become integrated into our everyday vocabulary. This is extremely harmful because it is belittling to those who suffer from very real illnesses and this attitude invokes a sense of shame to those who want to seek help.
Thus, as a Psychology student and as a member of society, I aim to bridge the gap that exists between how society perceives a mental illness and the reality faced by those who experience it. I want to gain a comprehensive understanding about how these disorders affect the people suffering from them and use that information to transform the deep rooted stigma that exists in society about such