Sylvia Plath’S Biography And Contribution To Mental Health Industry
Many people experience excruciating childhoods that later lead into our older ages of life, an author that had a rough childhood is Sylvia Plath. According to Biography. com, Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 27, 1932. Sylvia’s father, Otto Plath, died when she was eight years old. Sylvia felt free but betrayed. After her father’s passing Sylvia’s mother moved the family to Wellesley Massachusetts; where she later graduated high school in 1950. After graduating, she moved to New York for a month becoming an editor for two companies. In New York is where she started to suffer a deep depression, so she went back home to Massachusetts. At the age of twenty, she had her first attempt of suicide by taking sleeping pills and hiding underneath her house for three days. After the incident, she went into psychiatric care for six months and endured shock therapy to help her overcome the depression. Three years after her suicide attempt she married Ted Hughes. She worked as a receptionist as she continued to write her poetry. In 1959, Sylvia gave birth to her daughter Frieda. A year after giving birth she released some of her poetry in London where she was living at the time. In 1960 she also gave birth to her son Nicholas. Shortly after her son was born, she had a car accident that she later came forward to be a suicide attempt. Sylvia found out that her husband was having an affair with another woman, resulting in her getting a divorced with Ted. She continued to write deep and interpersonal poem while going into a deeper depression. On February 11, 1963, she stuck her head in an oven that then killed her.
Sylvia Plath would be known for her impact on people who have mental health by being an activist that shows her emotions on her social media and helping the studies of mental health. Sylvia Plath would stand as an activist for mental health funding and drug price regulations Sylvia Platt suffered from depression which is a form of mental health condition she suffered from after going to New York to worked as an editor. Plath would want an increase on mental health funding because the mental health in the United States has had an increase of people who suffer from Depression, Bipolar Disorder, or Schizophrenia. But, “President Donald Trump recently passed a new health care act that decreases the funding to both mental health and substance abuse treatment programs by $600 million dollars; however, he did include a fifteen million dollar grant for people with serious mental health issues”.
Sylvia would believe that we should not be decreasing the amount of money we spend on mental health because it is a serious subject. Decreasing the money spent on mental health is only going to make the spending of insurance money higher because when a person doesn’t eat for multiple days, their body starts to shut down leading a person to go to the emergency room. After the emergency the patient is going to be sent a bill, and most likely if they cannot afford that bill they are only going to throw it to the side. So, either way the government is going to be paying for the medical treatment a patient will endure. Another social issue is having drug price regulations, so people can get the proper medicine to treat their mental health or other illnesses. Soand so states, “Americans pay two to six percent higher than the rest of the world”. If a child of a person who is living on low income, that does not have insurance because they do not qualify for it has to pay for their medicine, out of pocket, they cannot afford to pay sixty or seventy dollars for it. More than likely that person it just going to avoid getting the medicine because they have other priorities. If people took mental health more seriously there is a chance there could be less violence, for instance, school shootings, if the students that caused the act of violence had the proper treatment by talking to someone and expressing their feelings the situations could possibly be avoided. If she was still alive today she would be known as a famous poet on social media.
People would also know her by her book The Bell Jar along with her poems she has written. Today she would use social media to put out her work rather than publishing it on paper and in books. Social media is one of the most used entertainment there is today due to the easy access of it on our phones, laptops, and tablets. She would post about how everyone goes through a hard time and those hard times only build you stronger and to grow from those experiences, but she would post about her times so the people that are suffering the depression or just not feeling like she belonged here. Also, she would post how people should live their lives instead of having a phone in our hand, and we should pursue our goals in life and not let the complications at the time take over what you are going to do in the future. Sylvia has days where her depression was manageable, and she felt somewhat happy. However, there were other days where she did not want to be alive anymore, and the depression was unbearable. So, depending on the day would determine what she would post on her social media.
The people who like to read dark, depressing, and betrayed poems would be the audience that would follow Sylvia her social media. She would also use her social media to help stand against the stigmas against one another with disorders. She would explain that mental health does not only affect the mind, but it also affects the body by feeling fatigue or having a heavy weight sitting on top of your chest. She would not use her social media for others, but also for herself because when she wrote it help let out her feelings rather than building them up inside to where she acts upon the thoughts of her mental illness. Sylvia would support a charity that would help the people who have a mental illness and try to undue barriers between one another.
Sylvia supports the charity National Alliance on Mental Illness or NAMI because as she started to begin her career and moving to New York she has had problems arise in her mental health. She would write about how the mental health industry is constantly growing. She would talk about how there does not have to be a stigma between the people who do not have a mental health and people who have a mental illness. She would explain how when a person goes through a time of vulnerability whether it be sexual abuse or a death in the family, or any traumatic experience that can lead to the downfall of the mental illness. When a soldier goes to war and watches his buddy gets shot the loud explosions repeatedly happen, or getting held hostage from another country, it puts, and leaves imagines in their mind scarring them to suffer from breakdowns when they are reminded of the incident. People may think that the breakdowns can be dangerous, and that is why people fear people with a mental illness. However, if a person is treated properly for their mental health illness then nothing will make them have a nervous breakdown because the medicine they were prescribed or took therapy lessons to help overcome their challenge. She would tell people to know their feelings and know that it is okay to express those feelings to others when going through a hard time. Not expressing emotion is how mental health is caused, it can cause anxiety disorders to mood disorders that are hard to overcome alone. She would publish the article on the NAMI website, and then she would share the link on her social media so the people that follow her will feel better about themselves and the people that do not have mental health issues will treat them as one another, and know that we are all humans that deserve a chance to be who we want to be. When people see her, they will know that she is a strong person and that she will be the person that will always treat them as if she knew them.
She would possibly write a book about what it’s like to suffer from mental illness and she would donate seventy five percent of the proceeds to the NAMI organization: so the organizations can try to help more people who do not have the opportunity for people who cannot afford the medicine, but also to help increase the studies of the brain to see how the body reacts with each disorder and how they can help improve treatment.
Sylvia Plath would be an important figure to the world because many people do not know how to seek help from a professional or believe that nothing is wrong with them, so they live their life in a fantasy and act like everything is okay when they are out living their life, but when they are in their mind they over think and stress about anything that is going wrong around them. Mental health does not have enough information we come across to help people be aware of the symptoms that they are having. If everyone knew their feelings and how to express them or when to know that something is wrong then there could be less violence, to others or oneself. Without the knowledge of mental health, we would not understand how or why some people do they actions they make when they do not seek the help they need to treat it. Sylvia Plath would be a major icon to the mental health industry to make it more known in more than one way.
