Bulimia and Anorexia Are More Common in Females

Mental illness is a big part of society nowadays and is more open to people to talk to one another about Mental Wellbeing. Therefore, I will be exploring three key areas in this essay from my thoughts and attitude towards Mental Illnesses, the stigma on the individual and last the different ways of improving mental Wellbeing.

Defiant my views changed towards mental health after watching a close friend grow up with me through school and college years but sadly when hit adolescence than later suffered from depression and bulimia. Some days she couldn’t physically sit next to me at lunchtimes as it was so difficult for her to be around others who were eating in front of her, the smell caused her to want to throw up. According to David Pilgrim, this quotes, “Both bulimia and anorexia are more common in females and tend to emerge in adolescence. Bulimia typically emerges in late adolescence but anorexia has an earlier onset.”

My thoughts towards Mental Illness certainly changed when I witnessed many incidents in the past eight years, being with my current partner, who suffers from PTSD, Epilepsy and Schizophrenia, and watching numerous different documentaries related to Mental illness. Therefore, Mental illnesses intrigued me in wanting to further learn more in-depth into how people's minds work. There has been a specific incident that has happened in my time that certainly changed the way of thinking towards individuals who suffers from mental disorders, it all triggered off from my partner having innumerable epileptic seizures from losing a child that led to absence sleep and depression. Which then led to further outbursts of his intelligence, that his arms were twisting, and he could genuinely feel the physical pain when it was happening, and the doctors kept on questioning can you feel pain in these areas, which encouraged him more to believe that it wasn’t a hallucination. 

Someone like me never thought it was so crucial as it was. Some occasions he used to jump from his sleep and his reflective thought where I was tickling him, but I was in a deep sleep, so I woke up with him dragging me out of my bed, pinning me against the wall with his hands around my throat, then suddenly he realized he was not himself, and he was not right and asked me to take him into the hospital. Therefore, P.J Mckenna states in her article “The psychopathological basis of delusions in schizophrenia is poorly understood. The most enduring of several early theories have suggested a causal link with formal thought disorder, whereas recent approaches have proposed relationships with a variety of cognitive abnormalities”. Therefore, this shows that this evidence states that hallucinations are a very common symptom for a patient who suffers from this mental illness.

Stigma refers to the social consequences of negativity attributions about an individual based upon a stereotype. In this case, this is where the majority of where mental health problems begin, from trying to achieve a look from social media, magazines or posters, but we all know is a sham, they have edited and Photoshop that much, the results they aren't anything like the first caption taken. As David Pilgram stated, ‘’These features are associated with emotional reactions in others such as fear, contempt and disgust, though pity and concern may also be evoked. In this case of stereotyping of people with mental health problems, all of these reactions may be present in different promotions from one situation to another.' so, this I found social media has a huge impact on different illnesses from obesity to bulimia.

I also have found there is plenty of negativity and not much support without being judged with perpetuate shame. I have witnessed there is a lot of people being judgmental when it comes to people taking counseling up as psychological therapy. According to Sarah Aziza, she states in her article, “Like lying on long leather couches and taking Rorschach tests — many people still imagine that “seeing a shrink” is something that only “crazy” people do.” so, therefore, my thoughts on therapy are individuals need to question themselves before judging other success on trying to look into the future with a different outcome on life.

Society and the media have played an extensive role to change my outcome and thoughts towards Mental illness. Young society in mental health and wellbeing has never been so important, especially during this worldwide virus. People often say viruses don’t discriminate. On the other hand, somehow the COVID19 pandemic has certainly affected varies greatly, especially new-born. Alex Thornton quotes, “Predictions of an upcoming mental health crisis have been made since the start of the pandemic, with so many people cut off from their usual support networks just as they experience greater stress and anxiety”. This shows how much family and friends meant to one another and the simple things like taking your children to a play area or going out to see relatives and not have to social distance.