Tag: caitlin spillane

Unit 3 reflection

Moving from Unit 2 to Unit 3, I realized that I had previously focused all my research on looking into the many issues women tend to face in the workplace and how those experiences tend to negatively affect mental health.  I am very glad that I looked into these important matters, but I noticed that I ignored the mental health issues that men often face which, unfortunately, many other people also ignore.  For Unit 3, I chose to solely focus my research on men’s mental health issues and encouraging males, specifically Syracuse college students, to find help if they need it.  Through my investigations I found a wide range of information on the subject due to my focus being very broad.  Therefore, my infographic consisted of imploring men to acknowledge their mental illnesses if they recognize the mentioned symptoms that I included.  After, I put different ways to find help to guide the readers in the right directions to show how accessible the aid can be. 

A lesson that I learned through my work was to utilize the free resources that we as college students have the privilege to access.  Freshman year I never did my research through the Syracuse Library Database because it was an unfamiliar tool, and I did not feel the need to try it.  I regret this decision after using the database this entire summer and quickly finding very helpful articles and scholarly pieces that otherwise would have taken me much longer to find. 

Something else that I took away from this course is that in some cases, a conversational tone in writing can create a better impact compared to an essay that sounds very professional.  I would say that the best advice I received from this unit was to know your audience.  I say this because if the writing is for fellow college students, then there would be no need to make the language more complicated then necessary. 

This assignment held a lot of value for me because I have seen two of my brothers struggle with mental health issues and neglect to reach out for help until it got much worse.  I think that by researching the stigmas behind mental illnesses and why there is a disparity between male and female mental health helped me understand what they went through and are still currently going through.  Writing 205 was very different compared to some of my previous writing classes because we were actually allowed to research things that held interest to each of us individually instead of being forced to write an assignment on something that I did not care about.  For all of my projects I was allowed to narrow down each topic into something I wanted to research and look further into.  The next time I have flexibility in choosing a subject, I will make sure that I pick something that interests me and that I want to learn about more.

Final Project-Caitlin

I decided to make an infographic on mental health to try an raise awareness to the stigma regarding getting help for mental illnesses, especially for men. I thought that an infographic would be an ideal method to spread this information because the very nature of an infographic necessitates that the message is clear and concise, so it is more likely that more people will read it. To ensure more readers, I propose that this infographic be emailed to the entire Syracuse student population to properly address the target demographic.

My target audience for my project is male college students because I think that this information is very prevalent to this particular age group and can notify people about the topics of mental illnesses and where help is offered. By sending an email to everyone, we can at least know that all students had the opportunity to read about the options for help, either at Syracuse or anonymous hotlines.

I know a lot of people who struggle with mental health issues and I have seen my brother and a few of my guy friends struggle to acknowledge their suffering because of this stigma with asking for help. It is important for everyone to know that they are not alone and that help is an option. Even if an illness is not physical and visible to everyone, that does not mean that it is any less problematic and less deserving of aid.

MENtal-Health-1Download

Research Project Draft-Caitlin

MENtal-HealthDownload

This is my final project draft. My audience is college age men that struggle with mental illness because it is a very big issue that still has a stigma attached to it. I thought that the best way to reach my audience was to make an infographic that could potentially be email to the student population of Syracuse because that would ensure that a great number of the proper demographic would see the information. I still need to add my citations for my final submission, but this is what I have so far!

Discussion 8/16

For my unit 3 project, I have decided to focus on men’s mental health and raise more awareness on the stigmas surrounding the issue, such as “men are not allowed to show emotion”, “men should not cry”, etc.  To teach more about this, I think that the target audience is between teenagers to young adults, so high school and college male students.  The best way to reach this group, in a professional manner, would be through an educational infographic sent by the place of education.  By sending out a campus wide email, it ensure that the pertinent information is easily accessible, concise, and available to a large portion of the target demographic. 

I am aware that an issue with sending a school wide email is that many students tend to, either ignore their emails or briefly skim them.  To counteract the proclivity to glance at the emails, I would make it as brief as possible, yet maintain a good amount of necessary information in easy-to-read sections.  And for the students who neglect to read the email at all, the infographic could be printed out in poster format and posted to various doors in different halls.  Therefore, I will try and make the infographic as visually pleasing as possible.

The reason I think that this information for this target audience should come from the schools, is to solidify that men have resources to help deal with their mental health issues that are offered at most colleges/ universities/ high schools.  At the end of the memo, I would remind the students that there are always people willing to help, and in Syracuse’s case, just a phone call away or right across campus at the Barnes Center.

What is an Infographic? Examples, Templates, Design Tips

I personally really like this infographic in reference to my research because I could try to make mine come across as a sort of step by step to getting help and to counteract the stigma behind men’s mental health.  I also want to include statistics on my infographic so I am still looking around at different examples. With this particular one, I enjoyed that it is very simple and easy to understand but that also just makes it a little boring, so I want to make mine more engaging.

Project Proposal-Caitlin

My project will focus on the stigma behind men’s mental health and the stereotypes that deter men from reaching out for help.  The reason I want to research this issue is because throughout this class, I have mainly focused on how sexism affects women because it is something I can relate to, but I want to research men’s mental health and show that it is also very important too and a topic that needs to be talked about more.  This issue is commonly ignored due to stereotypes such as men don’t cry, need to ask for help, or show emotions is incredibly harmful and untrue.  It creates a more toxic scenario in which the person struggling refuses to ask for help resulting in the problems festering and getting worse.  There is a reason why almost two-thirds of all suicides are by men.  This is the first time throughout this class that I am looking into this problem so I currently do not have any sources, but I am sure that the Syracuse Library Database has many promising articles, and I plan on looking for informative TEDtalks that go further in depth on men’s mental health because I am sure some exist.  Through this research, I want to show people that they are not alone in their struggles and that there is no shame in asking for help.  No one deserves to struggle alone.  I think my intended audience would be men in their late teens and early twenties who might not have had the courage to ask for help and still believe that there is something wrong with needing help. 

Discussion 8/9

  1. The article How To Create a Culture Manifesto for Your Organization by Mollie West talks about various different companies that all take time to think about their culture manifesto and develop it as a team.  Each company that explained their methods in creating these manifestos all went about it in different ways, and yet reached many of the same conclusions.  West took these incredibly different organizations and accentuated the similarities between all of their approaches to manufacture these.  Her article was separates by paragraphs, each concentrating on a company and their culture manifesto, specifically the way it came about and its main focuses.  After speaking about the various ways they came about within these organizations, the article wrapped up by informing the reader of a beneficial way to compose one’s own culture manifesto, as the supervisor of a company.  Through this last section of the article, it became clear to me that the intended audience are the managers/supervisors in charge of large groups of people, because men and women in charge should clarify the companies’ beliefs and expectations in terms of its workers.
  2. After concentrating the past two units on women’s mental health in reference to sexism in two different professions, I think that I am going to focus more on men’s mental health and the ways in which it is ignored due to toxic expectations for males.  For my previous research, I wanted to delve deeper into topics that might affect me in the future as a female, but for this unit I wanted to switch things up.  I have witnessed some of my brothers and my male friends struggle with various different mental health issues and have seen the aftermath of them strictly internalizing their problems without reaching out for help because of the belief that men don’t need any help.  These stereotypes are very harmful because the ideas that boys should never cry or show emotion gives the notion that these potential answers are not viable for men.  I think this research would mainly benefit men who might need a sign to ask for help and to realize that they are not alone in their struggles, so to do this, the information would be most beneficial on a platform where everyone would see it, such as popular social media sites.  Many people my age find much of their news on their phone on sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, etc.  Therefore, if research and reputable advice was posted there, the intended audience would have a high chance of seeing it and hopefully listen.

Discussion 8/2

  1. The linked article that I concentrated on was titled Make Your Meetings a Safe Space for Honest Conversation by Paul Axtell.  The reason Wynn chose to include this resource in her argument was because it solidified her idea that many employees struggle to have their misgivings voiced and actually taken into consideration.  Many of their voices are ignored altogether by superiors within the employee’s company.  Wynn’s entire argument relies on the fact that too many companies disregard their workers needs and concerns especially in relation to diversity and aspects of a person’s individual identity. 

Axtell’s article states a way in which managers can potentially create safe spaces where employees can share their concerns and issues, or just talk freely without the fear of not being heard.  He heard about this method from a meeting and it made an lasting impact on him, hence why he wanted to share it.  The person Axtell discovered it from would have occasional “no secrets” meetings, where the manager of his specialization would treat his employees to pizza and everyone would talk freely.  They would use broad openers to create conversation and encourage everyone to be as honest as they could.  This method would foster a sense of camaraderie, trust, and respect for everyone. 

He then goes through helpful advice for potential leaders to achieve these ‘safe places’.  The leaders should start with asking for permission, to address things that may already be assumed gives the group more trust since everything spelled out exactly.  Next, the leader should make sure that he/she empowers and encourages the people in the group to all share and contribute to the conversation in a way they are comfortable reaching out.  This should all be done while promoting the idea of safety within the talk and ensuring that everyone is listening and being respectful.

The reason this article goes so well with Wynn’s article is due to the fact that they contrast each other.  Wynn speaks about how companies tend to lack a sense of trust because organizations, in many cases, do not make the effort to address and change the inequalities on a companywide scale and, instead, blame the injustices on the individual and society.  By linking Axtell’s article, Wynn shows an exact way in which companies and leaders can promote unity and create trust between coworkers.

2. I think that people in charge of organizations and the men and women who hold leadership positions within organizations would benefit the most from Wynn’s article.  The reason I believe this is her target audience is because of the quote “If you were an executive tasked with reducing gender inequality in your organization, how would you do it?”  To me, this quote is the reason Wynn wrote this article: to address all the places organizations allow these inequalities to thrive, instead of stopping the issues at their roots.

The passage titled Recruiting is a place where the organization can make a big change and a place where these leaders can see where their biases often take place, creating the necessity to target them in this article.  This is “the very first moment organizations interact with potential candidates” and where “biases can infiltrate the process”.  Therefore, the superiors in these companies should address their inequality problems as soon as possible in the process.

Discussion 7/26

Alcalde-Rubio, L., Hernández-Aguado, I., Parker, L.A. et al. Gender disparities in clinical practice: are there any solutions? Scoping review of interventions to overcome or reduce gender bias in clinical practice. Int J Equity Health 19, 166 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-020-01283-4

  1. This article, titled Gender disparities in clinical practice: are there any solutions? Scoping review of interventions to overcome or reduce gender bias in clinical practice, revolved around the authors research trying to determine if there are any possible solutions to the gender biases that exist in the medical world.  To figure out if there are viable results, the researchers included and compared studies that had implemented various potential solutions and perused the collected data to reach their conclusions.  The studies varied according to health issues, country, description of intervention, etc.  There were 22 different types of interventions being researched and most of them had varying successes in attempting to make the healthcare field less gender biased, but four of the studies were unable to accomplish this. 

I think this article focused more on the potential solutions for ways to intervene in the gender bias that permeates the healthcare field, but it did not go into detail about what each of these studies did.  To incorporate this article into my research, I am going to include it in the end to prove that there are ways in which the gender gap can be narrowed, the correct interventions just have to be pursued in order to help.

2. I chose to expand on Emily’s response to “The Subtle Sexism of Your Open Office Plan” because she speaks about how her experiences working in the open office environment escalated her anxiety due to the extreme lack of privacy at her work.  Instead of having private spaces, the entire facility lacked any kind special areas where a worker could be alone even if it was just for a few minutes.  Emily realized after a few months that all of her female coworkers also experienced this and that all of them had also found a private space near their office building where they could find privacy.  This response really illustrated the experiences women have in the open office concept regarding mental health.  The author of the article spoke about how the glass offices with no privacy made female workers feel as though they are under a microscope and Emily’s experience confirmed that.  Mental health is something that should be taken much more seriously and if most women cannot even feel safe and comfortable at work, then the open office concept should not be considered a good thing.

Research Plan- Caitlin

My plan for my research project is to bring more awareness towards the misogyny women sometimes face within the medical field, either as doctors and nurses or as the patients.  The questions that I am primarily asking are related to why this sexism is so prevalent, especially within the healthcare field.  I really want to know the reason behind the unconscious biases that many male doctors have against women who go to hospitals with ailments.  The reason I want to research the misogyny against women is because I have heard many stories, either online or from my friends, that are firsthand accounts of their experiences with doctors who do not believe their pain or look past the real issue just because of their gender. 

I do not have any interesting reason related to why I chose to research this topic.  Personally, I just want to make this problem more well known to others that might not have been aware of it.  Sexism is prevalent in most places and careers so healthcare is not much difference in that sense, but in all those other instances, those prejudices are not in trouble of being life threatening.  Many people can and have died due to the thoughtlessness and biases of doctors who ignore issues regarding women. 

I think something the fields that will help me the most for this assignment are professional articles because they will solidify my arguments and help make my research more well-rounded.  In addition to the professional fields, the aspect of my project that will be the most appealing with be the personal anecdotes from a primary source that shows a firsthand example of their experiences with this issue.  This source will help counteract the logos of the articles and add an aspect of pathos to my writing.