Exploring Mental Illness In Males With Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds

The following proposal concerns the development and delivery of a nutritional and low impact exercise training program for all inpatient males’ ages 16-34 diagnosed with a mental illness, more specifically those diagnosed with schizophrenia and taking antipsychotic medications. As most of us know maintaining a healthy diet is important because it promotes not only physical health but mental health. This is of more importance when we’re speaking of persons who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, because these patients are more often diagnosed with metabolic disorders than others.

1. The purpose for this educational training is to help educate this population of males diagnosed, with the benefits of a combination of good eating and exercise habits. This education program will be put in place to assist patients in adopting good physical health, and to provide them with easy to follow information on how to read food labels in order to help them to make better choices when it comes to eating when they are outpatient.
2. The proposed audience for this study will be males ranging from age 16-34 years old living in Maricopa county. This demographic is very important to teach, because according the United States Census bureau there is an estimated 16,307 males in Maricopa County alone that suffer with a mental illness. Additionally, I would like to target the material for those who have a lower income status because also according to the United States Census bureau 9,587 are unemployed and having little or no access to the healthier food choices is of great concern.
3. This proposed educational program is needed because according the in doing keyword search in Chin, I found that the populations of people who suffer from schizophrenia, have a high risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, even if they do not take antipsychotic medications.
4. Diabetes takes time to peak and the higher the glucose levels in the blood, cause for a higher increase in the risk of developing diabetes. And according the CDC the most common symptoms are increase thirst, hunger and fatigue which all play a vital role in weight gain.