The Abnormal Mind: What Goes Wrong

Tomorrow morning you wake up, and instead of feeling like your normal self, you feel sick. You’re coughing, sneezing, you have a fever, your body aches and you just want to stay in bed and sleep. Those are signs that something is wrong with your health. You feel abnormal. Your collections of warning signs are called symptoms. When taken to a doctor, he/she takes your symptoms and can then tell you what underlying condition, or syndrome you have. This feeling of abnormality happens also in mental illness. Mental illness can appear in a person in many different ways. Normally, it is classified as a combination of how a person thinks, acts, feels and perceives information. If something is off with the way a person goes through these processes, we see it as abnormal behaviors of the mind. Some mental illness is temporary, something that lasts only a short amount of time, while other illnesses can last for months, and sometimes years of struggling. Mental health can be measured in morbidity rate vs. mortality rate. Morbidity rate tells us how many people have been recorded to have incidences of disease or ill health. Specific to mental health, it tells us how many people are suffering from mental illness in general, or broken down into specific illnesses. Mortality on the other hand tells us how many people have passed away in a specific or general population. But as you can see, this only gives us statistics, how many people are suffering vs. how many people passed on. This is why they developed the mental health continuum. The continuum depicts the range from healthy to mentally ill based on how impaired you are, and how much distress you are having. In a healthy human being, the normal everyday stresses of life do not cause an impairment of daily functions. Someone having a mild or moderate amount of distress, enough to impair them for a temporary amount of time is not labeled as having an illness so to speak, but considered to have hit a ‘rough

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