Policy Memo for Mental Illness Issue

During my Fall 2016 semester, I was required to write a Policy Memorandum for the government on an issue the government currently faces. We could choose whatever country’s government and whatever issue we wanted as long it had something to do with the government. Then, in our Policy Memorandum, we would write the summary, background, and issue with our topic and end it by writing ways to improve the issue. For my topic, I did the issues of mental illness within the United States.

For this, I had to bring awareness to what mental illness was, the history behind the issue, and what are the ways that we can fix this issue. Through this project, I mostly used resources in order to find the information I was looking for. Most of the resources were provided from University of Hawaii at Manoa’s library online resources. However, a few were from some of the organizations’ websites, who’s purpose is to inform the public about mental illness and what the government can do to help. Some of my solutions and my writing were also influenced by what I learned about the effects of mental illness when I was a Psychology major.

The reason why I picked this topic was because of my interest in mental illness, which was the main reason I started off college as a Psychology major. Mental illness is a controversial issue, and many people have different opinions on what’s the best way to help the mentally ill, including me prior to the research. However, then the question becomes if the solution seems obvious then why hasn’t the government fixed this issue? It’s because all issues are complex to the point where I could barely explain the whole problem of mental illness in a 1500 word essay. I had to learn to limit what I wrote while getting the main points across in order to inform the reader. I also had to make sure to write the research essay in a way so that they would be able to understand what the issue is without having read the same resources as me.

You can read the memo here.