Young Adult Mental Health Treatment

Young Adult Mental Health Treatment: Answers to Complicated Questions About Mental Health Disorders, Treatment, and Challenges

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Many people believe that young people have the resilience of youth in all aspects, including mental health, making them immune from mental disorders or challenges. The truth of the matter is that they are just as vulnerable as everyone else, which is why young adult mental health treatment is something that more people should give serious thought to.

Young adults face everyday challenges much like everyone else, and even the supposed resilience given by youth has a limit at some point. This is why their mental health should also be of great concern to everyone.

How Does Mental Health Affect Psychological, Emotional, and Social Well-Being?

Mental health is an encompassing term that covers a person’s emotional, psychological, and social well-being. A person’s mental health, in whatever state it might be, affects how the person would think, feel, and act. People sometimes don’t understand why they are feeling in a certain manner, or why they acted in a certain way. This could be due to the state of their mental health.

The World Health Organization defines a person who is mentally well or is in good mental health, as the following: someone who can achieve their full potential, effectively cope with the stresses of daily life, and constructively contribute to their community. Mental health is all about physical, mental, and social well-being. It allows people to live a more fulfilling life. This is regardless of certain external factors that would normally bring down anyone else who does not have good mental health.

Does Mental Health Have an Effect on Overall Health?

Even in this day and age of readily available health information, many people are still not aware of how much mental health could affect a person’s overall health.

While it might have been dismissed as conjecture or coincidental in the past, more and more studies done today on the importance of mental health are pointing to how many conditions could have been brought about by poor mental health. This also further highlights the importance of mental health programs for young adults.

• Depression

  Even before it was proven that depression was responsible for many chronic conditions, many already had an inkling that people who were primarily depressed or melancholic had an underlying condition they might not know themselves. This supposition has since become practical knowledge, which is why people are now actively seeking treatment for depression.

  Depression has been linked to the development of many conditions, including:

  • Diabetes
  • Asthma
  • Cardiovascular disease
  • Various types of cancer
  • Arthritis
  • Insomnia or hypersomnia

• Schizophrenia

  Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that causes people to perceive reality differently, most often in an abnormal manner. This condition is often described as a combination of delusions, hallucinations, and chaotic thoughts that lead to aberrant behavior and thinking.

  In some cases, it is so bad that it impairs many functions of the body. There are cases where a person suffering from schizophrenia had an episode where the person thought that they did not have any hands, and was completely unable to move the hand itself, even though nothing was wrong with the hand before the episode of schizophrenia. In other cases, a person with schizophrenia could suddenly perceive food being eaten as something else, and vomit whatever amount of it was already eaten. If this episode becomes chronic, the person could become malnourished or dehydrated quite quickly and become very ill.

• Suicidal Thoughts

  Both depression and schizophrenia could become so severe that suicide becomes a possible outcome. For a person with depression, the grief and melancholy could be so bad that death becomes an inviting thought. In many cases, there would be no indicators that the person would attempt suicide, which often leaves people wondering why they did.

  Most people would think that those who suffer abuse or bullying would be the most viable candidates for suicide, which is why many are surprised when successful or prominent people are reported to have died by suicide. Even worse is the fact that many suicides could have been prevented if only someone was able to discern how poor the state of the person’s mental health was before the suicide.

  People who suffer from schizophrenia are also prone to suicidal thoughts, as they could be experiencing a particularly powerful delusion or hallucination that they cannot handle, and the only solution they can think of is suicide.
  

• Greater Tendency for Risk-Taking

  The term “nothing to lose” often describes a mindset that people with poor mental health have. This kind of thinking often leads to behavior that put the person at greater risk in different aspects. Some take to smoking, alcohol, or even illegal substances because they feel that they have nothing more to lose in doing so.

  The risk could also take the form of life-threatening situations, where the person does not bother to think of safety precautions anymore in whatever they do. Many have seen dangerous high-speed car chases between the police and someone they are pursuing in the news or reports of vehicular accidents that were so horrific that people would wonder what the driver was thinking that led to the mishap.
  

• Malnutrition

  Actively pursuing a healthy lifestyle is also a good indicator of sound mental health. People who eat healthily, get into a habit of exercising and stay away from practices that could harm their health don’t just possess a strong body, but they also exhibit strong mental health. The same could be said when the situation is reversed: people who neglect their physical health could also have poor mental health.

  In many cases, being in a shameful state of mind often suppresses the appetite, causing the person to eat less than they should. Or when they do eat, they eat food items that don’t help their nutrition in any way. Conversely, people suffering from a poor mental state could also overeat, or eat food items that only cause severe weight gain, pushing them to obesity. Once obesity sets in, the person could then develop the typical complications from being overweight, such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.
  

Is Mental Health Also Connected to Emotional Health?

Mental health and emotional health are inextricably connected in that certain mental states directly affect a person’s mood and behavior. In this aspect, both people in poor mental health and people who suffer from one form of mental disorder or another could manifest mood swings. Mood swings are a state where a person’s emotions could suddenly, and often unpredictably, change at a moment’s notice, even without provocation.

Poor mental health could aggravate any emotional issues a person might be going through by pushing the person into pessimism further. Pessimism should be differentiated from pragmatism, as some people would insist that they are not being pessimistic, and they are only being pragmatic about the situation. Being pragmatic about the situation means accepting things as they are, regardless of how bleak or dark the conditions might be.

The level of acceptance in pragmatism serves to protect the person from the more forceful and destructive aspects of emotion relevant to negative occurrences. A person who has accepted things that are happening due to their pragmatism may actually manage their expectations about the matter, or even prepare a contingency plan should things go awry.

Being pessimistic, however, mostly entails expecting the worst outcome out of most situations and falling into despair because of it. This is instead of trying to figure out a way to make the most of things or even trying to think of a way to fix things.

Why Is Mental Health Worse For Young Adults?

For most people who went through it, the teenage years are typically full of confusion, turmoil, emotional troubles, and severe awkwardness. All of these things make adolescence quite difficult, and this difficulty takes a toll on a person’s mental and emotional health.

Growth and Confusion

Teenagers could experience conflicting emotions and thoughts mainly because their body is transitioning between the last years of being a child to growing up to become a young adult. Hormones released during the growth spurt period also contribute to the confusion and turmoil felt by teenagers, not to mention the severe awkwardness of their body parts suddenly changing and becoming more pronounced.

Teenage girls will begin to experience menstruation and the accompanying inconvenience of the phase every month. Teenage boys will start to feel certain emotions brought about by the development of their reproductive system, not to mention the awkward and often unmanageable growth of facial hair.

Adults might not consider these things as having a major impact on their mental and emotional health. However, for many teenagers, this is a period where most things barely make any sense, including how they feel about their development.

Peer Pressure and Social Awkwardness

Many teens have the misfortune of not receiving moral support during times when they feel confused the most. This will take a tremendous toll on their mental health, as they are already in a phase where they are trying to figure out who they are, what they want, and what they should do.

Most teens will also feel the need for acceptance by peers, which is why popularity and social acceptance become highly aspirational for them during this time. The irony of this fact is that many could not handle being popular, as certain expectations come with it. Even others try their best to become accepted into the “cool crowd” or the groups that they perceive to be the best to be a part of.

Young Adult’s Mental Health at Orlando Treatment Solutions

The young adult phase is never easy for anyone. The entire phase could take a tremendous toll on a teenager’s mental health. Generally, they might not even know that it already is a tremendous toll because of the confusion they feel at the time.

Young adults need all the help they can get. We, here at Orlando Treatment Solutions, are ready to give them that help. Adversity in life is indeed an important thing because it teaches us resilience. But no one ever said that we should not get help as we learn to become more resilient.

Let us help your young adult today so that the future will be a much brighter place for them because of how they went through the difficulty of adolescence.