With figuring out the topic that I wanted to do for my MA Project, I decided that I need to look for more articles about mental health, I want my podcast series to bean in depth conversation about why it’s important to take care of your health and how to know when someone is dealing with mental illness. The article that I found was “Suffering In Silence: Mental Health Stigma and Physicians’ Licensing Fears”. Ever since the the Covid 19 pandemic occurred in 2020, mental health awareness has become the topic of conversation in the years since. Physicians can become reluctant to diagnose people with mental illness because of the difficulty and potential consequences that may come with that. mental health is a sensitive topic, and it can be difficult to diagnose someone who’s going through something if they look fine physically. Mental health has grown into a stigma in the medical community, and because of this stigma there are fears that physicians have when diagnosing someone with mental illness.
My reason for picking this article is for mainly two purposes. The first purpose is because I’ve been a victim of mental illness for years before I even knew what mental illness was. My illness came from depression and being an overthinking a lot, the reason I want my project to be focused on mental health is because there are people out there like me, who don’t know that they have it but can feel that something is bothering them. My second reason that I feel like this article is impactful for my project is because I was unaware of the fears that physicians can have from a diagnosis. At first i thought the fear stemmed from the unknown of how a person could react to that news. But learning about the consequences that physicians can face, I can understand why there’s some fear for them.
When it comes to my progress on my project, these past two weeks have been physically and mentally draining for me, so my time of work I’ve spent on my project has not been good. I am still waiting to hear back from two potential committee members and I’ve started to gather some more articles for my research and am beginning to get a binder together for my work. My next steps are two follow up with my potential committee members and begin to write my thesis paper (at least the introduction) and outline how I want the rest of my paper to loos like.