Health Project

Growing up in the United States, when one thinks of health, the most obvious thing one thinks of is physical health and well-being. Throughout the unit, we have learned of other forms of health, such as social, spiritual, emotional, mental, and moral. However, the way people tend to choose to determine the healthiness of an individual, is often purely through their appearances, rather than their mentality. People have a tendency to associate health with this idea of the perfect body- toned, muscular, tan, skinny. There is this idea of perfection that people long for and, when they fall short of that, they may appear "unhealthy" to the rest of society. In actuality, I feel mental health is probably one of the, if not the most important aspects of health. Rather than promoting "Flatter Abs" and "Tighter Tummies" on the covers of magazines, I think society should also work towards addressing the basic mental problems that people face. For instance, the lengths at which people go to in order to maintain that perfect healthy body, can not at all be mentally healthy.
In discussing the issue of emotional health, the class debated whether or not a person was healthy depending on the emotions they were presenting to the world. For instance, if one person is constantly happy, or another experiences extreme highs and extreme lows, are these people emotionally healthy? In this discussion, it seemed that most people agreed that it all depended on the reasoning behind the persons emotions, and that they were somewhat aware of said reasonings. If someone were to experience something heartbreaking, we would expect them to mourn for a bit and acknowledge that that is the reasoning behind they're sad demeanor. However, if they remained in that state constantly for months, we would feel that that person was not emotionally stable. Essentially, it was determined that emotional health is when a person is able to experience varied emotions to a reasonable degree and be able to comprehend the reasonings for these emotions.
However, for some people, this is much easier said than done. Some people have to deal with emotional instability and therefore seek out help from professionals. In this case, we are dealing with a persons mental health. In our course, we examined different types of therapy and the ones we found to be most effective. A clinical psychologist is "a professional who is concerned with helping people live healthy and productive lives - someone who helps people solve problems of living or resolve mental health problems." (Paul G. Mattiuzzi, PH.D., http://everydaypsychology.com/2006/10/what-is-psychology.html). As a psychologist speaks to a patient, they hear about a persons issues related to everyday life (job, family, etc), while they try to understand the mental functions of the patient and their mental processes. There are many different subfields of psychology, and clinical psychology focuses on identifying destructive behavior in a persons life, and looks to understand and prevent it. I feel this is an effective way to help mental health. It creates a relationship with someone who helps to identify what the problems might be in your thinking or way of life, and how you can overcome it, in order to lead a healthier life.
I feel that an understanding of mental health is much more crucial than the emphasis we put on physical health and its appearance. Physicality is always so encouraged, and although I do believe that it is also necesarry in order to live a healthy life, it is not the only thing. Society should balance out the emphasis they put on both physical and mental health, in order to prepare people to be more rounded individuals.