Mental Health An Integral Part Of Everyone s Health

Mental health is an integral part of everyone’s health and well-being. Mental health is affected by numerous factors in daily lives such as stress from work or school, relationships, and environment. The World Health Organization (1948) defines mental health as, â€Å"a state of well-being where the individual is capable of handling normal stressors of live, working productively, and contributing to his or her community.† A mental illness, or disorder, is characterized by alterations in thinking, mood, behaviour, or a combination of the three, where an individual has impaired functioning or distress. The Canadian Psychiatric Association (1996) explains that at the root of the impairment there are dysfunctional alterations in biological,†¦show more content†¦a). School-aged youth are especially vulnerable to mental illnesses. This is important to note because at this age, adolescents and teens are going through a stage of crucial mental health development, their instability along with the pressures of being attractive and cool can have a large impact on their mental health development. Being a fairly recent high-school graduate gives me thorough insight on the issue of mental illnesses affecting school-aged youth. Adolescents and teens are subjected to numerous pressures of growing up, whether it is being the best at a sport, attaining the perfect weight, having the nicest clothing, getting the best grades, being accepted to the best university, there are more than enough. Facing these pressures are hard enough without the instable mental health and lack of education on mental illness. The pressures come from an adult world, where the youth strive to be what they have deemed as perfect, unknowingly subjecting themselves to pressures that do not naturally occur in their adolescent age (Wasylenka, n.d. a). Without the pressures they face, adolescents and teens mental health development could occur much differently, given a stable environment. There is a lack of education of what mental health is and a very blurry line between mental illness and mental health problems within the middle school and high school. Given the proper education and support, youth can and will do very well (Wasylenka, n.d.