Week 8 - Eunice Valencia

Eunice Valencia

ASA 189B

Week 8

Growing up, I never really understood or questioned what mental health is, it never was brought up or talked about. Living and growing up in an Asian household, I was/am expected to do well in school, pass all my exams and get good grades. It wasn’t until high school when I started to question what mental health was all about and my own. “Belief in Mental Health,” is a story about Kai Cheng Thom and her suicidal attempt after coming at as a transgender. In the article, she talks about how she was hospitalized after attempting suicide but her parents rubbed it off like nothing happened. Her father wanted her to take the SAT’s the day after the accident and act “normal,” as if nothing ever happened.

She then begins talking about mental health. She said, “the trouble with

most is that they fall into the trap of prescription: a human being should feel this

way, act this way, do this, do that, in order to be mentally healthy,” which really relates today’s generation. But people experience happiness in different sorts of ways, just as how people cope in different ways. People are “diagnosed” with different disorders because it is seen as a business. She mentions how mental health is something “the individual may purchase for the price of the right psychotherapist or medicine or

yoga class or mindfulness app.” Or how mental health is a biologically based. But the reason goes beyond that.

Two of the big questions she asked was “But what if, instead of asking how mental illness can be contained or eradicated, we asked instead how it can help show us what kind of healing we really need? What if, instead of clinging to the fantasy of mental health in order to deny our suffering, we asked our suffering what it is trying to say?” And I do question it as well because people tend to forget about their mental health or just brushes it off. Or simply getting medicine because the doctor said so. I think we need to explore what heals your own body?

Why is mental health often neglected? What are some ways to bring awareness, especially to college students?