Free Essay On Mental Illnesses

The list of mental illnesses that is currently presented in DSM 5 has not always been the same. In fact, homosexuality has been removed from it only in 1973, and the symptoms of various disorders, including schizophrenia, depression and anxiety disorders have been changed many times during the existence of the manual. Needless to say that disbelief in God or other beliefs that were not popular in society were treated as mental disorder, and the victims of such social construction of a mental disorder had to spend their lives in asylums for their “madness”. These examples are evidential of the problem that mental illnesses are indeed very often dependent on current beliefs of the majority of people in a given society, and unless the minority of scientists provides substantial and persuasive evidence that a certain condition should no longer be treated as a mental illness, there will be more and more victims of a social construction.
The dependence on social construction makes it very difficult to create a stable and all-encompassing definition of this notion. The signs of this problem are vivid when one notices the major difference between the definition of a mental illness in DSM-5 and DSM-4. This difference signifies that the professional community has not yet arrived at a commonly accepted definition that will destigmatize the notion of a mental disorder, although the steps are being taken in this regard. Currently, given the progress in understanding of what a mental disorder is, its definition should include the following characteristics: alterations in a person’s thinking, behavior, cognition, feelings; these alterations should have negative effect on a person’s life, causing distress and inability to continue leading life that is normal to that person, including activities in private life, work and social life. For this reason, a person should seek treatment when he or she feels such distress or believes that he or she needs treatment. However, the society should not force treatment, despite many people believing that a person with a mental illness would only benefit from it. One of the keys to recovery is personal desire to recover and absence of compulsion, since it can only aggravate the situation and create more distress in a person’s life. Only if it is proven that a person is in such a state when he or she cannot make decisions regarding personal health, and this state is proved by a professional psychiatrist, the relatives or social workers can devise options for treatment that still will not cause more distress to such person.