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Section A: Mental Health Education
Introduction to Mental Health and Mental Illness What is Mental Health?
Mental health is the term used to help identify and talk about the way a person feels, thinks and behaves. It’s a very broad term, and encompasses a lot of different things including memory, concentration, attention, knowledge, emotions, impulses, behaviors, relating with others, taking care of ourselves on a day to day basis, and many other aspects of functioning. Mental Health is oftentimes a difficult thing to understand because, unlike physical health, things are less easy to understand and define. People sometimes struggle with concepts related to mental health because people are very different than one another, and this can make it hard to understand and help people who struggle with mental health concerns.
Questions: When you hear about Mental Health, what do you think of? Can you think of times that it’s hard to talk about mental health with others because their experience is so different? What helps you to discuss things related to mental health?
What is a Mental Illness?
A Mental Illness is a condition, diagnosed by a mental health professional that disrupts a person’s ability to think, feel, behave, relate to others, or otherwise function on a day to day basis. A mental illness usually centers on a type of experience or series of symptoms. These experiences or symptoms might be clustered around anxiety, depression, attention, disorganized thoughts, experiencing things that aren’t there, or believing things to be true that are not true. In order to be diagnosed with a mental illness, a person has to experience these symptoms in a way that is different than the everyday person, and these symptoms have to make life harder for the person being diagnosed. Mental Illness affects a great many people, with research showing that at any given time approximately 19 percent of Americans are diagnosed with a mental illness. While that number might seem small, that’s about 48.7 million individuals, or the entire population of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Illinois, North Dakota, South Dakota combined with a few other states to spare. Other research suggests that about 31% of all Americans will experience mental illness directly at some point in their
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