Bridget Baldwin, Utah State University
Mental illness is a major topic throughout the country, and especially salient among the millennial generation. Mental illness affects approximately 1 in 5 adults per year according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, commonly known as NAMI. Mental illness has been negatively viewed, and society generally avoided any talk about it throughout the last 100 years in the United States. Margaret Price, along with other thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Lennard J. Davis, discuss the ways in which disability and mental health lack acceptance and treatment due to normalization. Mental illness is affected by normalization because society tends to hold every person to the same standards, even though standards are not attainable for every member. Margaret Price says, “Mental illness introduces a discourse of wellness/unwellness into the notion of madness…. This well /unwell paradigm has many problems, particularly its implication that a mad person needs to be ‘cured’ by some means.” Does a mentally ill person need to be cured? While mental illness treatment and discussion has come a long way, mental illness is greatly affected by normalization, and society generally tries to fix mental illness, rather than accept it. This project analyzes the causes and implications affecting mental health due to normalization by doctors, health care providers, and society at large.