defining social problems-a visual exploration Referring to some of the social pr

Question

defining social problems-a visual exploration
Referring to some of the social problems you noticed as operating in people's stories,answer one of the following apply the sociological imagination to one or more of the people's stories as a way of understanding social problems relevant to them

y-we-used-to Prodigy D High School Admin E Iic Univ Sign in or Register[C APUS CLE : HIST "I found out on my 21st birthday that my dad was leaving my mom. At first I was angry with him. It seemed extremely selfish. But when I finally agreed to talk to him, he told me that he'd been depressed for five years. He told me that he'd felt trapped in his life and his marriage. He even told me that one night he drove out to a bridge, thought about killing himself, and only changed his mind at the last minute. Part of me empathizes with him. I never realized he was hiding this depression from us. But at the same time he made choices that really hurt our family. So I'm trying to figure out what blame he deserves. At what point is a person with mental illness still responsible for their choices?" NEW VORK

Explanation / Answer

Depression is the biggest mental illness that a person can have. A person who is under depression does not know what is he doing under the affect of the depression. The mental state of the person could be dangerous - he could either cause harm to himself or cause harm to others. Depression is the bad state of the mind, where a person cannot differentiate the difference between the right and wrong under the affect of the depression.

Any mental illness has at least the potential to impair full knowledge of the act or its sinfulness or full consent and so to reduce culpability for the act. As you can see here, author's dad is leaving his mom on his birthday. As per the culpability of the act, he is doing wrong, by running away from the family problems. But that should not indicate him as a person who is committing a sin or a wrong act. His mental state of mind is also important, which needs to be considered.

On the other hand, if this person cannot be said to be morally responsible for the act, that doesn't make the act any less of a sin. What it does though is lessen that person's culpability for committing the act possibly to the point where they are not culpable at all. In other words you know its a sin, its just a matter of figuring out how culpable someone is for the sin. This man is not capable of handling his family responsibilities, so instead of just being depressed, he should take some break for himself from his wife and family, do something he likes and spend some time in solitary.

Mental health is always so much harder to judge than physical health though. If you physically aren't capable of doing something its much easier for people to measure that than if your mentally incapable of getting up and performing a task. If you would classify someone's depression as severe I would think it would be very hard for that person's actions to be considered entirely of their own volition though and very hard to consider any of their actions mortal sins.

Personally if I had severe depression and went out for committing a suicide or something else, I would feel the need to go and confess that. The grace of the confessional is always a welcome thing even if it turns out that the sin could not be considered mortal.

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