mental health

Dear Future President, We need to talk more about mental health. Your mental health is just as important as your physical health. Mental health is “Psychological well-being and satisfactory adjustment to society and to the ordinary demands of life” (Dictionary.reference.com, 1). Mental health is a serious problem that is getting worse everyday. 1 in 5 adults suffer from a mental health issue. That doesn’t seem like a lot but when you think of the population, 324,000,000, it is quite a bit of adults. Most people think mental health issues only come when you’re an adult, but about 50% of people with a mental health issue are under the age of fourteen and about 75% are under the age of twenty four. I believe that mental health should be talked about way more. There is about 41,000 deaths every year in the United States from suicide. Suicide is also the tenth most common death in the United States behind kidney disease. Bullying in schools has a big part in suicide. Recently, there was a 13 year old boy from Virginia who was cyber bullied and he committed suicide. In the US, for some reason, the rates are higher in the spring. About 1 suicide happens every 16.2 minutes. As you can see, suicide is a very serious problem and we should do something about it. Most victims in violent crimes have a mental illness, but 3%-5% of people with a mental illness commit violent crimes. If mental illness such as depression, bipolar disease, etc. didn’t exist there wouldn’t be as many violent crime according to these statistics. But not all people who commit violent crimes have a mental illness. Most violent crimes wouldn’t have been committed if there were more things like places to go to help. The thing is, we can’t talk about mental health too much because some people might be embarrassed, or most of the time, people don’t want to talk about it. usually , if you’re going to commit suicide, you’re not gonna tell people about it. What you should do is create a center where people could go to get free help or just maybe a place at a community center where people could go to get help. You should also make the laws policies for bullying more serious in schools. This is an issue that rarely gets talked about and should be talked about more. Signed, Sophie M.