For essay #2 inquiry-based research essay, I have decided to focus on teenage and young adult mental health in the United States. What has inspired me to find further information on this topic is the idea of what signs and symptoms are being missed by people surrounded around youth and young adults such as parents, teachers, administrators, and doctors that are allowing the growing rates of mental illnesses to continue. So, my thesis statement is that everyday activities such as school and social media activity create an environment for the stigma around mental health to exist. How can these route issues be prevented or curbed to allow growth for young adults in the US? The timeline of this project is as follows: by 10/19 I will have organized my research proposal, making sure my research question is clear and complex while having a thesis that supports the purpose of my writing. By 10/22 I will have some sources from both scholarly articles and regular magazine or newspaper articles to support my research question with data and elements of the rhetorical situation. By having a model essay, which I hope to find an article that can be of a similar or same social issue to follow I will be able to organize my ideas of my research to fit my question and thesis in a professional manner. By 10/25 I am planning on having a detailed outline of my draft in terms of following a model essay of my choice to allow me to develop my research question answers in the text, and lastly by 10/27-29 having a rough draft written and revised following the outline I wrote that will have purposeful evidence in support of my thesis. A description of my audience for this research paper will be parents, adults, and people who work and are surrounded by teenagers and young adults because as many youth peers can see the signs and stigma around mental health, the issue with this recognition lies within the older generations. This will help me focus on my research purpose and propose a good and complex research question. I have two ideas for my model essay right now, both of the links are attached below. One publication is from Regis University, and the second is from UK essays in 2015.  I have not found any good newspaper or magazine articles (tier 2), but I have found 5 complex and detailed scholarly articles. One source is “The Sitmga in Adolescence Mental Health” by Craig Heflinger (2010), the second is “Socioeconomic Status and Mental Health” By Stephen Foster from the APA (2021). The third source is also from the APA, “Young Adult Mental Health: Intervention, Services and Systems” (2015), my fourth source is from Springerlink Sportsmed “An Action Plan to Address Youth Mental Health Impacts of COVID-19” by Neelofer Tayyib in 2019 and lastly the APA article on “The Mental Health of Eleite Athletes” in 2016 by Simon Rice. Overall, these sources and more tier two sources will help me write and research my research question of why are the signs of poor mental health being missed by adults surrounded by youth. 

http://https://ccnymailcuny-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/ecortes002_citymail_cuny_edu/EXybJoFZy7lJt4d52wpeDOkB4EYKwc-9CTog_T9ZIRR0HA?e=PUXgb2http://https://ccnymailcuny-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/ecortes002_citymail_cuny_edu/EXybJoFZy7lJt4d52wpeDOkB4EYKwc-9CTog_T9ZIRR0HA?e=PUXgb2https://ccnymailcuny-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/ecortes002_citymail_cuny_edu/EXybJoFZy7lJt4d52wpeDOkB4EYKwc-9CTog_T9ZIRR0HA?e=PUXgb2

The social issue I’d be speaking of is the impact of the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S. I am a part of the LGBTQ+, I am omnisexual, and have just recently come out during this year. The LGBTQ+ community struggles to this day around the world, and I want to bring awareness to what has been done about it and what has been happening. There is always a new story about somebody getting killed or somebody killing themselves due to the inability to express themselves. Homophobic people continue to apply pressure and try to take our rights away, even though we barely have any. I will never understand why other people think they have the right to put their input or try to control a part of somebody else’s life. Nonetheless, I want to continue to educate myself on the social issue at hand because although I know some of what has happened in the community, I want to learn more about the past and analyze how much has changed since then.

As I was thinking about how to complete this assignment I first had to pick a place, picked the Dominican Republic. But, then I had to pick an issue which was the most difficult part because there are so many issues out there such as there is an enormous amount of low-income people that live there, the inequality of a white Dominican and a black Dominican, and the high crime rate, and many more. As I got to thinking there is one issue that is very little talked about, I didn’t even know this was a problem, and I know not many Americans know about this issue. Since I’ve always lived in the US I have become naive to believe that the treatment I get here is the treatment everyone gets all around the world. It seems to me that I have forgotten that there are other countries outside of our tiny little bubble that still see women as objects. Many people forget about how Caribbean women are treated. Everyone sees it as a beautiful island with beautiful women who know how to cook, dance, and clean, but they forget to see the true side of this small island, how horribly treated they are. I connect with this issue personally. Last summer I took a trip to DR  for a month and had met a girl. She was telling us about stories of living there and had said that there would be times when she would be walking to wherever she was going to and men would catcall her all the way there. The saddest part was that there was no way for her to stop it, even if she had called the police, they wouldn’t have done anything about it.

A social issue I want to discuss is climate change and global warming. The reason that I want to write about this is that it is an issue that is not taken seriously despite how serious it is. This is an issue that won’t majorly affect me in my lifetime but it still is something that I feel like we should work on. This is a topic that I was not that interested in until junior year of high school when I had to do a project on global warming in art class. In this assignment, I had to make a flyer on the issue of climate change and global warming. In this, the picture that I had chosen was one of what New York City would look like in a few decades. The picture had most of Manhattan underwater because the 2°C of global warming would lock in at least 20 feet of eventual sea-level rise, and an immediate transition to clean energy is needed to divert the world’s current trajectory towards a dire 4°C future. Seeing the picture of what I call home showed me truly how important it is that we work on this issue. I had done some more research and had found out the effect that global warming has on glaciers. I found out that the melting of glaciers, as well as ocean warming and expansion, lead to sea-level rise. Over the last 100 years, the global sea level has risen by about 10 to 25 cm based on analyses of tide gauge records. It is likely that much of the rise in sea level has been related to the concurrent rise in global temperature over the last 100 years. The world’s glaciers and ice caps have lost massive amounts of ice in the 20th century, with the process accelerating since 1988. All of this information that I had found out made me see that this issue is very serious, which is why I want to learn more about this topic.

The social issue that I’d like to work on for my essay is the inequality and struggles of the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S. While I myself am not apart of the LGBTQ+ community I recognize their struggles to this day around the world and would like to become more informed for myself and those close to me who are a part of it. They continue to suffer discrimination and are unable to express themselves like any other person just because of their sexual orientation and preferences. The idea of self identity and being able to form your own individual path in life is very important to me and I believe everyone is entitled to it in this life and its a shame that they suffer from trying to be themselves. There is a long history surrounding their struggles and fight for equality in the U.S and it continues to this day. I’d like to learn more about the history and the many issues that the LGBTQ+ community goes through in the U.S and how they are being handled. Learning as much information I can involving this social issue is important to me so I can become more informed on my views towards these issues and help spread knowledge on the topic as much as I can. The U.S is definitely one of the places with the most advocacy for change for the LGBTQ+ community so I’d like to focus on it and see the specifics of the situation here.

Police brutality is a social issue that interests me and it’s a very important social issue. It’s the unwarranted use of force by law enforcement where officers exercise excessive force against a person, to be more specific this happens more to people of color. it’s a very disturbing and extreme method that is not right. It includes beatings, racial abuse, unlawful killings, and torture by the police. The US police kill civilians at a much higher rate than any other country in the world. About 1000 people are killed each year by the police in the United States. The black lives matter movement brings attention to police brutality and what we tend to see in these protests is that people get shot/abused more than ever in these protests, even when we are trying to make a difference peacefully we still end up getting killed or shot at by the police. This is an issue that has been going on for a very long time. this topic interests me because it’s so significant and it affects people from all over the world. What’s really upsetting is that police brutality keeps increasing. There should be no reason why the people who were supposed to feel protected by are the ones that are making us feel unsafe. it has to come to a stop, it’s not right in any way.

Nativism and xenophobia are two societal issues that I’m interested in. The terms nativism and xenophobia relate to the preference for native-born individuals in a community and the dread of foreigners or “others” who are seen as outsiders due to their race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. This societal issue piqued my interest since it was something I had never heard of before, and as I went through the articles, I discovered that no one had brought it up. I’m curious as to how this became a public issue and what exactly the people were afraid about. I’d want to throw some light on this subject because I don’t think it’s something that’s commonly discussed. This is a very different subject matter from the usual hot button issues like global warming, racism, gender equality, and abortion. I’d like to know more about why nativists thought that Mainlanders were lowballing native-born labor in the United States, leading to hostility and restrictive laws. This is an important subject that must be addressed. These anxieties typically stem from cultural differences, and they have been there since the 1800s and well into the 1900s, when similar attacks were launched against immigrants from Arab and/or Muslim nations. I’d want to go more into the reasons behind the rivalry for employment and the resulting prejudice. Who benefits from anti-immigrant sentiment when it targets newcomers to a country as well as anyone (regardless of nationality or immigration status) who is seen as an outsider due to physical characteristics/appearance or cultural distinctiveness?

The social issue that most interests me is mental health in the black community. A lot of Black Americans don’t have access to get help, and it is unfair.  Since they don’t have this access, they often use other resorts that are not as beneficial to help. This topic interests me because it’s a cause that is often slept on and not brought to light like other social issues. I want to know more about what outlets they use to solve their cases since they don’t get help and the statistics rate against white people with mental health. I want to know if they are provided these resources for benefit how it will change the overall stigma of mental health and black Americans. I also want to know that if this stigma changes will more black people go and seek help and get the help they need. I’ve seen growing up people turning down support because they feel they won’t benefit from it because of how the system is set up. Black mental health is not taken seriously as white mental health. This is why I chose this topic. I hope in the future there will be an improvement in the resources and help that black Americans get because everyone deserves an equal opportunity.

The topic I decided to go with is mental health. The reason I chose this issue is because it is a challenge that several people go through including myself. It always seems to be an endless struggle between the mind and the emotions. Where both never seem to be on the same page, often causing severe problems for the person. Mental health problems come in various shapes and forms. It’s not something that can be confined into one category, neither does it have one “face”. It is an invisible pain, which many keep to themselves out of fear of becoming a “burden” to others. Mental health is something very complicated, you never know who is going through what. I was interested in this topic because I have personally witnessed the struggles my best friend, and certain family members faced because of it. It’s not something to be taken lightly, the affects of mental health can be detrimental and devastating. Often cases, people don’t know how to respond when someone opens up about their situation, especially parents. Most parents aren’t exactly open minded and often blame the child for their mental health problems. Most parents tend to be the root of their problems or can even make the situation worse. But by educating oneself on the topic, as well as others, it can help spread awareness about the topic and how to help those facing these challenges. Through this we can learn how to lend support to those who need it.