Agency's Role




I looked at the National Institute of Health and their role in protecting the environment. They are part of the Department of Health and Human Services and help prevent and protect against illness. It is very wide-reaching in that they perform research, implement health interventions and develop tools that improve health. They focus on things like chronic diseases and infectious diseases, and have developed things like vaccines and new therapies to address them.

One area I found interesting was their categorization of depression as a chronic disease. They identified it as a disorder to the brain and showed how they have technologies like brain scans to show this. But, even though so many people suffer from depression, I'm not sure the awareness and accessibility to therapies and brain scans are as available as they could be.


Comments

  1. Jordan DemosOctober 11, 2018 at 6:50 PM

    Stacey,

    Your last comment about availability to therapies and brain scan availability is something I would agree with. It seems to me, at least in this country, we have a serious lack in terms of care for people who suffer from mental illness wether its depression or something else.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousNovember 11, 2018 at 10:19 PM

    Hi Stacey,

    Oh its so great that NIH has resources and technologies to scan brains to monitor/access depression. Depression unlike some of the other chronic illness is invisible in some ways. You can say I am depressed but unlike say like a heart disease, all the symptoms of depression seem like these factors that contribute to depression. Having scientific tools to measure it, is revolutionary. This is definitely my first time hearing it

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