This week’s lesson covered a big topic that hit home for me on many different levels. I come from a family and culture that doesn’t give mental health the proper acknowledgement as it deserves. Within my parent’s household as kids, we did not talk about our emotions or feelings and it wasn’t that we didn’t know how to, it was the lack of space for them to be talked about. See my parents grew up in a time where mental health was looked as being equivalent to a disease. Which is similar what was explained in the reading about how the society treats those diagnosed with a mental label.
As I grew older, I embodied the same complex that was taught to me about withholding my emotions, pushing them down until they were nonexistent, or so I thought. Living like that led me to be on edge, angry, walking around with a chip on my shoulder, taking everything personal, just overall hurt. It wasn’t until I reported to my first command that I began to truly experienced many people from all walks of life. There was this Sailor that I had become acquainted with, after sometime he told me that he was being separated due to him failing to adapt to the military. Me being a fresh boot, I didn’t understand what he meant but what I had come to find out was that he was suffering from many things with one being depression. However, his depression did not come across as the usual sad or uninterested behaviors, his was reflected in the company he kept, the behaviors he indulged in, and mechanisms he chose to cope with his depression. He was once an outcast that did not have many friends or family until he joined the military and he met people like himself who were also trying to figure out life. However, they were into partying, drugs, violence, everything they signed up to not do. With him feeling like he finally found a group of friends that he could consider family and who made him feel important, he also part took in those activities. Which led to him masking his depression, loneliness, sadness, etc and ultimately him being separated.
As covered in this week’s reading, family and our peers have influences on us. As I read, I was able to understand how those influences have the potential to shape each person. It happened with me, until I began to really see myself and how cold I was to everyone and decided that I didn’t want to be that way. I had to make the choice to release the choices I made, which were a direct reflection of the influences from my parents. According to Gruman, studies have shown that peer influence has the most influence over adolescents when engaging in risky health behaviors. Knowing how being vulnerable and impressionable at different point in our lives allowed me to understand how he easily engaged with his friends’ bad behaviors and activities, regardless of the consequences.
Even though he showed spouts of his depression prior to him engaging in bad activities, he did not seek out the proper care until it was too late, until his supervisor noticed required him to go and until he was finally caught. I can only speculate how his life would have turned out to be if he had the proper care in the beginning. Overall, this lesson reminded me about how important it is to take care my own mental health even when I am feeling okay, as well as keep an eye out for those around me, mental illness can be displayed differently in different people.
References
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. SAGE.