Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

Mental Health: A Private and Personal Issue

Mental health has always been looked upon as a tragic illness that affects the person who has it, but at the same time can affect the people surrounding, and the society. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and OCD are all examples of mental illnesses that have brought a lot of pain to individuals and their families. From time to time, in events such as mass murders in which the person who is responsible was diagnosed with a mental illness, the media tends to make it sounds as if mental health should be a public social problem, when in reality it is more of a private and personal issue. Unfortunately, those kinds of illnesses prevent the person who has it from living a normal life and from being themselves,
In Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Dr. P, a teacher at a local school of music started acting in weird ways, not recognizing students by their faces, but once he would hear them speak he would know exactly who they were, by recognizing their voice. After a few doctor visits and a lot of speculation, it was determined that Dr. P had visual agnosia, a mental health problem he had been dealing with for a while but never really noticed. His wife, in the other hand, had already learned to live with his husband’s form of being, correcting him when he would mistake his foot for a shoe, or even his own wife for a hat. This shows how sometimes one isn’t aware of his own mental problems. However, in a different text written by a man named Walter Kirn, entitled A Pharmacological Education, Kirn talks about how he, in the other hand, realized how he completely changed the way he was when he took Adderall, a prescription drug that his doctor gave to him to deal with his ADHD. He realized that he was undergoing an education where he was depending on this drug to do well and become successful. He was able to do things that he had never been able to do, such as multitasking without failing on either task, or concentrating on only one thing without getting distracted or loosing interest in what he was doing. These are just two more examples of how mental health problems are better off being personal issues than a social matter because of the way they were dealt with and controlled by either themselves or family