Mental Illness In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

“Initial estimates suggest that about 450 million people alive today suffer from mental or neurological disorders or from psychosocial problems such as those related to alcohol and drug abuse. Many of them suffer silently. Many of them suffer alone. Beyond the suffering and beyond the absence of care lie the frontiers of stigma, shame, exclusion, and more often than we care to know, death,” states Director-General Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland of the
World Health Organization. Although not a real person, Lennie Smalls is shown to suffer from this, not silently however. Lennie Smalls, the intellectually disabled character shown in Of Mice & Men, faced the problem that those with a mental illness even to this day are experiencing: the lack of value from the majority of people
In today's age most Americans associate violence with mental illness, shown by a joint study between the Indiana and Colombian University. “The joint study by Indiana University and Columbia
University found that 12.1 percent of Americans surveyed in 1996 perceived people with mental illnesses as ``violent, dangerous, frightening''. That's nearly twice the 7.2 percent who expressed such concerns in 1950”, says the article. This association is assumed to be from the media presented to our society today, often showing those with a mental illness as the “bad guy”, these concerns expressed in the article with ``We really do need to understand how the media shapes these attitudes because there are concerns that they are having an impact,'' said Bernice A. Pescosolido, an Indiana University professor who co-authored the study released Wednesday. The article ensures while the percentage of people who linked mental illnesses to violence is small, the study found a growing acceptance for using legal means to commit people with mental illnesses if they are perceived as a threat to others. About 95 percent of respondents supported such actions in four of five categories of possible mental