In America, Mental Health is not something that is talked about as often as it should be talked about. To be quite honest, there are very few profitable conversations surrounding mental health and that is all due to the stigmas that surround mental conditions. Society’s views on mental health are not what they should be. Often people think that disorders of emotion, thinking, and behavior lack some form of legitimacy because there is no physical scar or physical pain that reflects how they feel on the inside. Society views these disorders as a reflection of a person’s weakness or their poor life habits insteading of seeing it for what it is, a disease.

Depression is one of the most known form of mental illness and in some cases, it is the most dangerous for the people who are diagnosed with it. Most often that not, people that are diagnosed with any form of depression have seeked out self-harm in order to gain some sort of relief. Some of the most common methods are cutting of the skin (70-90%), head banging or hitting (21-44%), and burning (15-35%). To a person with depression self-mutilation is a way to relieve that pain that is caused by their mental illness, and is also a way to express the pain they feel on the inside. When people see that someone has seeked out self-harm they often jump to the conclusion that the person hurting themself is craving attention when really that person is trying to find ways to cope with the disease that they are living with.

Though self-harm seems like the worst a person can do, it is actually the lesser of two evils. Suicide is one of the most tragic ways a person can deal with depression and more often than not, people who have depression have also experienced suicidal ideations. But some people go farther than ideations and take their own lives because the pain that they deal with is too much for them to handle. Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death in the U.S. for people aged 10-34 and is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. overall. Research also shows that over 90% of the people that do commit suicide have some form of mental illness. There are thousands of people that take their own lives because of a mental illness that was ignored due to the stigma surrounding it, but there are so many ways to prevent this.

If more people were to acknowledge the importance of mental health, there would not be as many problems surrounding mental illnesses in the world. Our world is fully equipped to find a cure for cancer, helping people heal broken bones, preventing infections from happening in the body, but why are we not equipped to help people who have a mental illness. Yes, one could argue that there are many medicines in the world that can help with the chemical imbalance happening in the body, but prescriptions can only help so much. Prescriptions such as antidepressants do help with the issues that are going on in the body, but they do not help reassure the person who has depression that they are going to be okay especially not with the stigma surrounding taking medication for a mental illness. People with any form of mental illnesses should be able to go to a hospital or go to a clinic and know that they will be able to get the help that they need.

Mental illness should not be taken lightly nor should it continue to have the stigma around it. We have gone far too long when it comes to ignoring the needs of the mentally ill and it is time to change that. Mental illness is not a decision, its s disease so we should be putting just as much and more effort to help people who have to live with this disease every single day of their life.