Mental Breakdown: Inherent or Extrinsic
Is our brain designed to have a mental breakdown once in a lifetime, or is it always our circumstances? I have been trying to figure out the answer to this question, however, I’m always met with some resistance with it, either by people or by my circumstances.
However, now is the best opportunity to explore this horizon with all the time and resources at my disposal. I think that our brain is a mysterious organ, and it hides many secrets, yet to be unraveled by psychologists to explain its mechanisms. I believe that having a mental or nervous breakdown is just like a reset button for discarding all the negative emotions, and feelings bloating our brain to work properly again.
As we live our life, we tend to gather negative feelings or emotions, due to the actions or words, done or said by people around us. Those negative emotions build up to a certain extend by repetitive exposure until the brain explodes leading to a nervous breakdown to assume its normal functionality.
My motivation for searching for this particular question is that many of my loved ones and friends went through a mental breakdown, or are in the process of having one. I have seen it first hand, and I admit that it is not pretty at all. Some of them have not even recovered from their first mental breakdown, and they have gone down the slope of normality.
I hope to research this question to acquire the tools and skills to help them and to better prepare myself for having one if my hunch is correct. I believe that the information that I will acquire through this project will be quite useful to me in the present and the future.
For the assigned project, the requirement was to use the university tools at my disposal, which led me to the digital Mardigian Library. However, it’s not often that I used this resource for my research purposes, as “Google” takes precedent in all the matters, but having such a valuable resource is quite handy.
Especially, when we have open access to the research content, that is otherwise locked and requires a monthly subscription. Though it took me a while to grasp the working of the library, as I did, it was much easier and efficient to get the desired content from the precise filters it is equipped with.
The first step was to navigate to UM-Dearborn Library from the dashboard. Secondly, navigate to the student dropdown list, and then select journals. From there, I put the keywords as ‘Designed Mental Breakdown’, ‘Natural Course of Mental Breakdown’, and ‘Circumstances of a Mental Breakdown’. I used three separate searches to refine the results to get the content.
Furthermore, I chose the ‘Peer-Reviewed’, ‘Journal Article’, and ‘Psychology’, in the refine searches filters to display the most relevant articles to the question, I want to find the answer for. From here, I got one relevant journal article to incorporate into my paper.
However, I couldn’t find relative results to my questions, so, I decided to give ‘Google Scholar’ a turn. I opened up the google search engine and typed Google Scholar, which gave out the links below, and the first link helped me to navigate successfully to my destination.
There, I tried the same keywords, and even more like, ‘Natural Mental Breakdown’, ‘Nervous Breakdown Naturally’, and ‘Design of Nervous Breakdown’ etc. There were quite some useful results on the searches, and hence, I incorporated two journal articles from Google Scholar in this paper. I used the ‘Sci-hub’ website to have access to the locked content from the searches of Google Scholar.
The first source is from the Mardigian Library and I searched for it, using the above-mentioned procedure, as for the rest of the other searches. Price et al., in their article Young Love: Romantic Concerns and Associated Mental Health Issues among Adolescent Help-Seekers, talk about adolescents during pre, during, and post-relationships, and relates them to different mental issues, one of them being a nervous breakdown.
The article states that most of the mental issues in adolescents are related to relationship stresses, and post-breakup adolescents were more prone to exhibit mental issues, than the pre, and during-relationship adolescents. There were two samples, where 50% of people under study had help in dealing with the relationship, while the other 50% didn’t receive any help. The results state that the adolescents, who have had help fare quite well as compared to the adolescents, who didn’t (Price et al. 11-12).
This source helped me to answer the latter part of the question. From the source, I fathomed that nervous breakdown is not a natural process, however, it is a stimulus from the stressor, relationships in this source, that affects our brain to developmental issues.
So, from this source, I got to know that there are circumstances that affect the health of our brain, and they drive us to have a mental breakdown. The source can be useful in pinpointing away, where the nervous breakdown is always from the circumstances, and it’s mostly in the emotional stressors experienced at a young age.
The second source is from Google Scholar, and the source was acquired using the method above-stated Google Scholar mechanism paragraph. Swayne in his article The Concept of Healing and Integrative Care, states the emphasis of the placebo effect, medicine, and self-repairing system of the mental breakdown.
He admits that the real challenge with using psychotherapeutic drugs to treat mental issues is the constraint of society, unwillingness or abuse of the drugs by the patient, and the lack of creating a balance between natural healing and biomedical therapy.
The author argues that mental issues, such as mental breakdown regulate the self-efficacy system of a human, and it makes him more aware of his surroundings. Furthermore, the person undergoing a mental breakdown slows down, clears up his perceptions, and takes a step towards the brighter future, with the certain help from the psychologists and integrative care design (Swayne 37-43).
The source does add new information regarding my belief that mental breakdown is a way to reset oneself and discard negative emotions. However, in the source, it is a bit different. The source stands to tell that the mental breakdown drives a person to be more self-aware and have clear perceptions of the stressors, that cause him to become better in the future.
Although it is not a natural process, a person needs help to go there, and without proper help, the person can be driven to a more stray path. It expands the horizon on my original question, as is mental breakdown necessary to evolve or evolution can occur without it also?
The last source is acquired from the Google Scholar search engine, using the above-mentioned mechanism of unlocking the locked content from using the ‘sci-hub’ domain. Warren in his article Abnormal Behavior and Mental Breakdown in Adolescents, stresses the fact that young age is quite susceptible to foreign stressors, such as emotional and environmental disturbances that can have long-lasting impacts on the youth regarding their mental health.
Also, it’s quite difficult to pinpoint a certain age and time, where these stressors start to take a hold of a young person, and hence, the early on-set is quite difficult to diagnose. That is why, it is imperative to look for the start of abnormal behavior in adolescents, which can help in the early diagnosis of a mental issue, and they can be helped as early as possible (Warren 603-617).
This source expanded on the first source, that people with mental issues experience some sort of emotional disturbances or traumas in their adolescent years, that causes them to have poor mental health. It also helped in answering my research question that there is no natural mechanism in our brain to have a mental breakdown, rather it is prolonged exposure to environmental and emotional stressors, that affects the brain to an extent of having a mental breakdown. This source connects the previous two sources into evolving a new research study area, that I might pursue in the future.
This project helped me to understand much about my research question. Before that, I want to expand on the research skills that I acquired during this project. Before starting this project, I knew what a digital library is, but I didn’t know how to operate them efficiently and relied on open-source material in google, which was quite hard and time-consuming.
Through this project, I got to learn about our Mardigian Library, which is quite helpful in accessing locked content and furthering the research. I also got to know how to operate Google Scholar more efficiently and unlock content to pursue my research. Lastly, I polished my searching skills, by typing more efficient keywords to obtain precise results.
Coming to the research, I learned that nervous breakdown is not due to natural reasons and there is no design that a person must undergo a mental breakdown at least once in their lifetime. However, it’s quite an often occurrence, especially in young adolescents, which are quite susceptible to a mental breakdown and other mental issues.
The causes of the mental breakdown are prolonged exposure to external stressors such as, emotional and environmental disturbances, which affect our mental health negatively. The most susceptible age is adolescent, and that is quite hard to diagnose, as adolescents are going through emotional and physical growth, and these growths blur the abnormal behavior in them, ultimately leading to poor mental health, and puts them at a high susceptible rate of accumulating a mental issue.
However, all the research opened new horizons to me, to which I was oblivious. I learned that mental breakdown helps with evolution and adaptation to the world better. All in All, I can hypothesis that the mental breakdown is always due to external circumstances, and the most susceptible population is the adolescents.
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Works Cited
Price, Megan et al. “Young Love: Romantic Concerns And Associated Mental Health Issues
Among Adolescent Help-Seekers”. Behavioral Sciences, vol 6, no. 2, 2016, p. 9. MDPI AG, https://doi.org/10.3390/bs6020009. Accessed 16 Dec 2021.
Swayne, Jeremy. “The Concept Of Healing And Integrative Care”. Journal Of Medicine And The
Person, vol 13, no. 1, 2014, pp. 36-44. Springer Science And Business Media LLC, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12682-014-0201-6. Accessed 16 Dec 2021.
Warren, W. “Abnormal Behaviour And Mental Breakdown In Adolescence”. Journal Of Mental
Science, vol 95, no. 400, 1949, pp. 589-624. Royal College Of Psychiatrists, https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.95.400.589. Accessed 16 Dec 2021.
