Summary paper: Mental health affects the physical health

Summary Paper on how Mental Health Affects the Physical Health
Burning your hand in a fire affects a person both the physical and psychological sides of the incident. You have the physical with scarring, blistering, redness, swelling, and other possible issues that could be related to the burn. There is another side to burning your hand and that is the psychological aspects and they are as impactful as the burn itself. Symptoms such as anger fear of fire, emotional release such as crying or screaming and panic are all psychological aspects that came from a physical interaction. Mental health, not to be confused with mental illness, can have this same effect on the physical body as the mind and body are forever linked and work as a union and not as separate entities. The purpose of this paper is to show and highlight the links between mental and physical health and how these two types of health coexist. Highlighting the actual links between the two types, how mental stress can have adverse effects on the physical body, and how certain addictions create a psychological and physical dependency. These topics will then be concluded with reasserting that mental and physical health need to be treated as equals and to do this an understanding on the link between them has to exist.

Understanding Links between Mental and Physical Health
“Research shows that persons with severe or chronic physical illnesses often have a co-existing mental health problem. At the same time, persons with severe mental illnesses or substance abuse disorders have physical health problems that remain undetected or untreated.” Having issues such as ulcers or constant migraines can often be a sign of poor mental health instead of just a physical condition. Mental factors such as stress can manifest itself into the physical in forms such as the ones listed. The body and mind are linked in such a way that what effects one will affect the other. Taking a case such as a person being obese is a good example of a condition such as this. Someone who is obese obviously will have issues with blood pressure, possibly diabetes, but because of the social stigma that comes from being obese this person may also suffer from depression, lack of self-esteem, and be extremely self-conscious. The issue with this is that if this person uses food as a way to comfort themselves it will just keep this cycle going and the problems that come from being obese will compound unless a life style change is made or some other form of intervention.
““Research has shown that depression often causes changes that can worsen a medical condition and reduce the needed energy necessary to cope with changes and treatment schedules, creating a vicious cycle of worsening physical and emotional symptoms.” (World Federation for Mental Health, 2012) Tying this to real life experiences with dealing with a relative that has battled depression I can see clearly that this statement rings true. You have a person with a mental condition but it starts to really take its toll on the body. The person may actually start showing physical signs such as dark rings under their eyes or you may notice that they constantly have some form of sickness or headache. This was the case in my personal experience with my brother-in-law as he would hardly leave his couch for quite some time and always in his pajamas. The pajamas part is important because he wore them due to the fact that he was constantly complaining about all over body aches and it felt better to wear the pajamas. These symptoms he was feeling were directly caused by the depression. I did not diagnose this but I was able to witness that after receiving medicine all of these physical issues went away and it just is not that difficult to correlate those two different events together.
.“The bottom line is that mental illnesses occur with chronic mental conditions in