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McKensie Hendrixson

Nathan Hellmers

English 1201

18 January 2019

Proposal for Mental Health Research

Why have mental illness rates increased in teens and young adults? I want to learn more

about this topic because it has hit my family and friends very closely. I have had a few people I

knew and was fairly close to commit suicide, and I have had multiple friends that had to go and

receive help from attempting or showing signs of suicide. Mental illnesses such as anxiety,

depression, bipolarness, schizophrenia, eating disorders, and many more will be talked about in

my research. I would like to understand why these rates have increased so much since my

parents were in school.

Mental illness is not a joke, it is a serious condition where people need to branch out and

ask for help. Just this year, I lost one of my friends to suicide. She acted as if she was just fine

when she was around others, she always had a smile on her face, you would have thought she

was just any other happy teenager. She was such a caring and nice girl and would put any other

person's happiness in front of hers and she would branch out to people when she felt as if they

needed someone there for them. But once she would go home she would cry herself to sleep,

and have thoughts of suicide and no one knew but her because she never wanted to put her

pain and suffering in someone else's hands. The scariest part of these mental illnesses is that it

can all be covered up by one simple thing, a smile.

I feel as if the topic of mental illness is no joking matter, just as I said in the previous

paragraph it can be covered by a simple smile. Many teenagers and young adults have mental

illnesses and they may not even be aware of it because it is such a serious matter and they
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don’t believe that they could ever have something that seriously wrong with them. I think that

mental illness rates have been increased tremendously since phones and social media came

out. I feel as if these teens and young adults are bombarded with these negative thoughts

posted on social media, that they start to believe them and relate them to their own lives. I

believe that these illnesses need to be researched and looked at more closely because they are

becoming such a known problem in today's world. Stats and charts need to be looked at to see

when these illnesses became so popular and find out what is causing the rise in these illnesses.

This is a topic that hits close to home for me and I know that this is becoming more of a problem

day by day. I also know that not much of anything is being done about this, adults will just send

you to counseling, instead of digging deeper and finding the cause for this.

With my topic, I still need to learn many things such as stats and ratios of certain

illnesses to not having any at all. I am hoping to learn why there has been such a rise in

numbers since my parents were in school. I will start with Google but use sources that are

reliable, such as research from doctors, scientist, or other professionals. Research questions

that I am going to use in this piece, “Why have rates in mental illnesses increased?” and also,

“How much have suicide rates increased?”