Imagine that you are working at the front desk of a professional medical office.
ID: 3501549 • Letter: I
Question
Imagine that you are working at the front desk of a professional medical office. Part of your job is to greet each patient and help them feel welcome. A patient comes in and you smile and offer a greeting, but she does not respond. Instead, she sits down in the corner and starts talking loudly to herself. It seems like she is listing ingredients in her favorite recipe as she says sugar, flour, eggs, sugar, sugar, eggs..." This is unusual behavior-in fact as you previously learned, it may even be considered deviant since it is not what most people do when they come into a medical office. You wonder whether she has a lot on her mind, or if she may just be weird or rude. A few minutes later, the patient's mother comes in, approaches you at the front desk, and begins to fill out the paperwork for her daughter. She tells you that her daughter has a disability which is why her behaviors are different than the behaviors of other patients. Step 2: Create a New Thread for Your Initial Post by Wednesday at 11:59pm EST Respond to the following prompts in your initial post: Based on what you learned in the readings this week, explain how attitudes toward mental illness have changed over time. Reflecting on the term medicalization, how did your opinion of the situation change when you found out about the patient's disability? Discuss ways that employment, poverty, and disability are related. 1. 2. 3.Explanation / Answer
1. Over the years, with increasing awareness and dispersal of scientific knowledge about mental health, the stereotypes and false perceptions about mental illness have changed in societies. Typically, while earlier disorders such as schizophrenia, and phobias were viewed within the category of abnormality or as an occurance outside the experience of the ‘ normal’ people, in the contemporary age, people show a greater sensitivity of the fact that mental disorders are a matter of illness which can happen to anyone rather than an abnormal condition. As a result of this change in perceptions, people’s attitudes toward the mentally ill has also chnaged for better. more people regard mental illnesses as an illness "like any other" and are less likely to assume people with a mental illness are dangerous.
This has also transpired into legal and educational reforms where discrimination agianst mental illness of an individual is considered as a violation of the individual’s Fundamnetal rights. Today, more and more people may believe that people with mental health problems have the same right to employment as the wider population.