Original Inquiry

During my autumn semester of my second year at Ohio State, I took a class called Abnormal Psychology. Originally, I thought of this class as nothing more but another class to fill a General Education requirement. However, as I progressed through the class, I had learned about many different psychological disorders that I had only heard of and even had the opportunity to do compose an essay about a disorder (or a category of disorders) of my choosing: Eating Disorders.

My paper required me to utilize all the information that I had learned in the class as well as conduct my own research with the university library database. Upon completing this assignment, I realized that the minority population (referring to those in the psychological disorder category) are often stigmatized by the public, and the main reason for this stigmatization occurring is due to the fact that people are often under the influence of  “unconscious bias”, having preexisting thoughts and attitudes towards individuals with psychological disorders.

I realized that in our community, this issue is also present with other individuals as well, whether they are part of a minority group or not. There is a large amount of people who face stigmatization for even the littlest things and as a result, this often sparks debates within our communities that can even be a national issue. Such stigmatization and bias can easily be eradicated if everyone at least does a little bit of research about the topic of debate and understand the other party before making their claims. Unsupported claims often hurts others even though the person stating these claims did not mean any harm, and I believe that if everyone understands a little bit about each other first, then this issue can easily be fixed.

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