Essay Sample: The Importance of Mental Health Services

For this assignment, I decided to visit a local clinic in my hometown, Miskolc. Here, I spoke to a psychologist about some of the things that interested me in this class, and I wanted to know more about them in practical, real-life situations. The main topics of interest for me were the presence of the mental health gap here in Hungary, the availability of affordable mental health care, and the changes that the coronavirus pandemic brought with it regarding the average Hungarian person’s mental health. This visit was a very interesting experience because this way I had the opportunity to better familiarize myself with the realities of the Hungarian public mental health care. This familiarization was especially useful because I myself want to pursue this career avenue in the future.

The main reason I chose this clinic, and the psychologist of this clinic, is because I am mainly interested in mental health services that are accessible and available for lower income people. In my opinion here in Hungary many people simply cannot afford proper mental health care for themselves at a private practitioner at frequent, consistent intervals. This is why public mental health care options are very important, but unfortunately, they can greatly suffer from long wait lines and sometimes overworked and tired practitioners. These long wait lines in my opinion can be very discouraging and can cause people to give up on pursuing health altogether, especially if it’s regarding a more specialized issue.

There were many topics I wanted to discuss, but unfortunately, we didn’t have much time to talk everything through. Despite this, I feel like our discussion was very substantial, and I learned a lot from it. The person I talked with was always sure to answer my questions thoroughly, to help me understand these important subjects. In her day to day life, she mainly works with people referred to her by their general practitioner in the clinic.

One of the first things I wanted to talk about was the mental health gap. I was interested in knowing the perspective of a professional on subjects like the stigmatization of mental health problems like depression, or anxiety. The information I received from the psychologist was mainly in line with what I already thought. According to her this stigma around these issues is still a problem today, but fortunately, the situation seems to be improving somewhat with the younger generations. It seemed to me, that the main subject of stigmatization in this country, especially among the older generation, but still existing among younger people to, is medicine prescribed by psychiatrists for mental illnesses. I found that the overwhelming assumption about psychiatrists was that they will prescribe medicine without any thought, and that this medicine will completely change your personality.  I think these myths hold back many people from seeking proper help and makes me wonder how this problem could be solved.

After this, I wanted to ask her about the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on the mental health system. Another interesting factor according to her was that the current pandemic and its effects like the quarantine, loneliness, and anxiety caused a new wave of problems. Due to the pandemic, many people experienced newfound mental health issues which needed treatment. These new problems could have been caused by the loneliness and lessened social contact during the quarantines. The constant anxiety of the virus also placed a heavy burden on people, as did other social detriments, like the loss of jobs caused by the closed businesses. Unfortunately, according to her, the already existing waitlists for these services grew even larger, widening the mental health gap. I think this problem is even more prominent in smaller cities, where the availability of mental health services can be scarce.

Lastly, I wanted to know more about the cultural aspects of being a psychologist. More precisely, I wanted to know if there were some special resources, or knowledge in case she had to work with someone who spoke Hungarian and lived here, but perhaps grew up in a different cultural context. According to her this is not really a subject that is touched upon in training and education. In my opinion even if currently, with Hungary not being a very culturally diverse nation, this does not pose a problem in most cases, this subject should be brought up, and discussed more during university and later training.

I feel like this visit was very useful for me, and I am very happy that I had the opportunity to do this. I feel like many important problems were brought to my attention, and I think that this class helped me recognize and think through them. Providing mental health support is essential to our society and we must do everything to develop the existing infrastructure of public, available mental health care and lower the existing mental health gap as much as we can. This is an especially important task in light of the coronavirus pandemic, which caused and brought up mental problems in many people. Another important factor in my opinion is to make sure that specialized help is easily available in most parts of the country, not just in Budapest. This is an especially important subject to me as someone who doesn’t live in the capital and has experience with this kind of specialized mental health care not being available here, even though I live in a big city.