Challenges in Identifying Mental Disorders

Challenges in Identifying Mental Disorders

Mental disorders are a range of conditions that affect how people think, their mood and behavior. Some of these conditions include depression, bipolar disorder, dementia, autism and schizophrenia. It can be detected depending on the behavior of an individual. However, none of the indicators of mental illness, including suffering and social discomfort, can be sufficient relied on for diagnosis of an individual conditions (Butcher, Hooley and Mineka, 2014). For this reason, determining a mental disorder is quite difficult.

​To begin with, suffering is an indication of abnormal behavior. Depressed and bipolar people suffer a lot. However, some people with this health problem are usually too happy that it would be hard to tell if they are suffering. Moreover, people who are perceived to be normal by society could be suffering from one mental disorder or the other. Therefore, suffering as an indicator of abnormality, is not sufficient to diagnose any person with mental health.

​Social discomfort is another indicator of mental health(Butcher, Hooley and Mineka, 2014). It is normal for people to be offended and uncomfortable when someone does something undesirable near them. However, how they react can tell if they are normal or abnormal. For instance, many people with autism never want to be touched. In the event that someone touches them, they become frantic. Nevertheless, it should also be noted that normal people can also get frantic when their private space is interfered with.

​People who portray the above indicators of abnormal behavior or are diagnosed with mental health face social stigma.Once a person discloses their mental health condition, he/shemay be seen as incapable of handling anything and may end up losing their jobs or control of their lives. Due to the stigma these people face, most opt to keep their mental health diagnosis to themselves.

In conclusion, mental disorder can be detected through abnormal behavior such as social discomfort. However, it is hardto use one indicator when diagnosing mental disorder because even normal people may exhibit some of these behaviors under various circumstances. In the current society, mentally ill people are stigmatized and stereotyped. This ends up affecting them more and making recovery hard. For these reasons, all members of society should be objective when dealing with mental health issues in order to help the mentally ill recover.

References

Butcher, J., Hooley, J., & Mineka, S. (2014). Abnormal Psychology (16th Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Pearson.