Mental Health and Depression

After taking numerous psychology courses that tend to shove mental illness and the DSM down our throats, I thought I had a fairly good idea as to what we would be learning in psychopathology. More than likely, we would have been talking about the abnormal behaviors and mental distress of people and how the DSM can diagnose their symptoms and ultimately “heal” them through various types of therapy and/or medication. We also would have been told how beneficial and helpful these treatments are, and how revolutionary medication has become in the 20th and 21st centuries. However, after the first day of class, I knew this was not going to be like one of my typical psychology classes.

To me, psychology has always seemed one-sided. To be honest, I never even considered there being another side to the field. Having so much exposure not only through past courses I have taken, but through pharmaceutical companies publishing data that are supportive of these medications has skewed my thought process on the topic. I once had a conversation about this with a friend, and he told me he read somewhere that pharmaceutical companies spend more money advertising their medications than Nike does on its products. No wonder most of us are quick to jump on the bandwagon; we see advertising for drugs everywhere! Not only that, I grew up in a household of family members whose careers revolve around the medical field. Being around people who seem to know what they are taking about and who are so enthusiastic about the use of medication, makes you begin to believe drugs are the best solution, not only for most physical ailments, but also for mental ailments.

This course tested those popular beliefs. It forced us to explore other alternatives of psychopathology and the treatments being used. We had to consider that maybe everything we previously had been taught was false. At first, this was very difficult for me to do. Everything I knew about psychology stemmed from the DSM and the medical model. How could I just discredit all that knowledge? It seemed absurd. However, after reading the texts and addressing these issues in class, I noticed my presumptions of psychology were slowly changing each and every day. I started to relate some of the issues we discussed in class to my personal life and it made complete sense! This course truly has changed my opinion of psychology as a whole!

Universality of psychology was something that I began to strongly question. According to Rosenhan (1973), “What is viewed as normal in one culture may be seen as quite aberrant in another” (p. 1). For example, in many cultures it is highly acceptable to hear voices, but to hear voices in Western civilization is frowned upon. Like most things we shun, such as same sex or biracial marriages, hearing voices is something we are not used to, so we automatically assume that it is bad.

Unlike mental illnesses, physical illnesses are seen