MENTAL ILLNESS: FACT OR FICTION?

In the United States, there are three demographics of people with mental illnesses that are not getting the proper treatment that they need. Inmates suffer from mental illness while in prison and out of prison, elderly people who have mental illness are being placed in nursing homes and juveniles to young adolescents with mental illness disorder often engage in acting-out behavior or substance use and that is why the United States needs to improve the mental health reform by making the access to all individual and families and by reducing the barriers to treatments and services. People with mental illness ending up in jail because they are not getting the right treatment, and when they are caught committing the crime, rather than being given the proper treatment, they end up in jail. The increase of mental illness that’s being administered into the criminal justice system is due to the deinstitutionalization of the inmates. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSbFbv2Bs_0

 

 

ELDERLY WITH MENTAL ILLNESS.

CNAs lack knowledge about mental illness; they are not trained on how to recognize the symptoms of mental illness and how to handle the elderly people.

For example, an elderly person at the nursing home “…was screaming, and combative and improbably, that she had been moving up and down the hall, hitting and scratching and kicking the staff in a psychotic state,” (Levine 56). This resident was injected with an antipsychotic drug to stop her. Unfortunately, the nursing home where this resident was living didn’t have the proper consent to administer the drug and it caused major side effects to the resident. She became comatose; she was a victim of neglect that only lived on that nursing home for just seventeen days then she died.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?  v=Dl51G5gyNqY

                                                                    YOUNG PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS

 

 

This is an epidemic issue that we all need to pay attention too and we should be talking at school, we should be educating young people because it’s becoming a cycle that they are the ones who will be ending up in prison. Schools should have mental illness awareness day. By doing this, it will bring down the stigma, suicide rate might go lower, prison rate will be reduced and elderly abuse at the nursing home will be gone by then because the school system had stated advocating early and teaching everyone about mental illness. People sharing experiences will help those who have a mental illness that they are not alone, that they need to be treated with kindness, that the psychiatrist needs to figure out the root of the problem first before starting the medication. Insurance companies should start covering most of the treatment. The same children who didn’t receive treatment at that young age or sought for help grew up and ended up going to prison. As they get older, they end up at nursing home which at that point, they see no need to seek medical treatment because they are old. Mental health is an issue that is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood.

     

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsRF8xGgbPA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUlBZuQ2c0Q