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mental health in today's society

Mental Health, a plague in society, affects a person's emotional, psychological, and social well–being along with how we act, speak, think, and handle stress within today's modern world. There are many causes of mental health conditions, some causes are new to society, like social media, the new social standards, and "gender roles," while some causes have been around for a long while, like a child growing up in abusive home or genetics passing it to the next person in the bloodline. In today's society, more than half of America's population is suffering with mental health, every 1 in 5 people struggle with mental health in their lifetime. This has affected the economy and how it is viewed and run.

You may ask, who are people that can be affected by mental health? Anyone can be affected, from a young child with Autism or ADHD, to an adult who suffers with BPD or any other disorder. There are more than 200 mental health conditions that anyone in the world can suffer with. There are 5 major groupings of mental health conditions, mood disorders like depression or bipolar, can affect a person emotions and thoughts, causing the mood "swings" as it is sometimes worded. Anxiety disorders are a subgrouping of mood disorders. Personality disorders like borderline personality disorder (BPD) or Paranoid Personality Disorder (PPD), when given the chemical balances and imbalances in the brain, can affect a person's whole personality. Psychotic disorders like schizophrenia, are disorders that can cause hallucinations and memory loss. This is the grouping of disorders that commonly give mental health its negative stereotypes. Trauma-related disorders like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and dissociative identity disorder (DID) are mental health disorders that alter a person mind due to a traumatic event or events, like going to war, being a victim of abuse or even witnessing a crime. Some mental health conditions (like DID) are commonly mocked and shoved on a shelf due to the nature of the disorder, causing it to not get the right treatment or even worse treatment and misunderstanding. Finally, there is Substance abuse, cause from the abuse of drugs and/or alcohol cause a person's brain and body to be altered from it.

While there are many conditions under each group, they all, for the most part, have the same effect on the individual affected by mental health. It can physically and mentally drain a person causing fatigue, drowsiness, exhaustion and even causing them to move at a slower pace since they have no energy left in their body to function at a normal pace. In some cases, like ADHD, the condition causes the body to be overactive and makes it hard to sit still or even focus on classwork at hand. The majority of them can cause intrusive thoughts, obsessive thoughts, chronic muscle pain in the body, causing discomfort. With trauma related disorders, memories of the past can come back in flashbacks (visual, auditory, smells or all the above), night terrors and nightmares can come and haunt a person, PTSD can make it extremely hard for the person to be able to function normally and be able to live through life like the average person would. With DID, a child who has suffered an extreme traumatic event or multiple events, this prevents the brain from processing normally and becoming one functioning mind set, to survive their brain form parts or what is known as alters. DID, while being a trauma disorder, causes extreme amnesia between parts or alters within the body causing blackout memories. This can cause extreme confusion and loss of time. While many disorders have dissociation as a part of it, trauma disorders hold a heavier toll due to the events that caused the disorder. May of mental health conditions make it exceedingly difficult for the person to move about day-to-day life.

Overall, mental health has a massive impact on the world and not much is being done to truly help people who suffer from mental health every day. Ways we can help people are by doing research, helping friends and family whenever you can help. For a medical side of the crisis, offer better ways for these people to be able to get help instead of sending them to a mental health hospital or sometimes even a psych ward, if they do need to go somewhere to get the help they need, do not force them, let them go on their own and be allowed to have access to some form of internet or phone to message and call their friends and do not take them away from them, their friends/family could possible the one reason they could be still here. Offer alternate ways to heal and process their mental health besides putting them on medications that mostly do not even work for most people. In the end, society needs to open and offer more ways and conclusions to the mental health crisis in America.