The Importance Of Resilience In Mental Health

The Children of Willesden Lane, by Mona Golabek, is about a girl named Lisa Jura who is 14 at the time she is sent on the Kindertransport. When she gets to London she never gives up the hope of seeing her family again. Over the course of the story Lisa makes wonderful friends, is reunited with one of her sisters, and earns a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. By the end of the story Lisa is around 20-21 and is reunited with her older sister, her sister’s husband, their daughter, and has made her first debut. Even though there are many times Lisa wants to give up she never does using love, bravery, music, hope and just pure resilience to pull her though. According to “10 Traits of Emotionally Resilient People”, resilience is a belief in oneself, yet also a belief in something larger than oneself. Lisa mainly uses three forms of resilience love, perseverance, and music to pull through her hard times.

Many people have different adjectives and phrases to answer the question “what is resilience” but each answer is the same. People know what it means to be resilient, but there are not many resilient people in the world. Not many people could get beaten, verbally abused, and come back against all the odds. To be resilient people need to keep their dignity and their pride and that is exactly what Louis Zamperini, Ed Roberts, Jason Zimmerman, and Frederick Douglass did. These four men had all the odds against them with so much suffering, but they rolled up their sleeves and fought through that pain because they are the true definition of resilience. Resilience is the ability to overcome adversity, fear, and show strength.

The more live a child is, the better they get out deal with life as they grow and develop into adulthood. Resilience is about being independent, standing on your own two feet or victorious back the power. It is important because it can wait on reverse rough of the effects that bullying can have on children and young people.

Throughout the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls recalls her family’s past and the struggle they went through. She inadvertently teaches the audience her meaning of resilience. But how is resilience defined? In short, resilience is the ability of a person to appreciate what life hands them instead of sulking upon it. A quote by Elizabeth Edwards supports this definition and ties in with Jeannette Walls’ personal experiences. “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good.”

This essay will look into how the concepts of resilience and the four trajectories proposed by Bonanno can be applied in the case studies. The target population of the case studies is people with medical conditions, namely, spinal cord injury, SARS and breast cancer. Furthermore, this essay will focus on the similarities of how people behave when facing a stressful situation. [[[[[Different percentages of trajectories, the possible predictors and the reason of the differences in the percentages of different trajectories]]]]]]

Hardy, Concato & Gill (2004) stated that resilient people are those who display “the capacity to remain well, recover, or even thrive in face of adversity”. Masten (2001) as mentioned that they are the ordinary person dealing with the challenges and tragedies of everyday real life. For instance, the response of many Americans to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and individuals’ efforts to rebuild their lives shows their resiliency. Being resilient does not mean that a person does not have or had experience difficulty or distress; the emotional pain and sadness are common but the path to resilience is likely to involve considerable emotional distress.

It is an ordinary process for humans to cope up with “demonstrable risks” (Masten, 2001) i.e. threats that have noticeably brought unwanted issues in one’s life. Resilience can be defined on two foundations; risks and positive adaptation. It is a quality of a person to accommodate with unfavorable alterations in life derived as a result of exposure to risks such as financial crisis, divorce, health problems or disaster. Therefore, resilience cannot exist in absence of risks.

Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. Various characteristics are needed to be resilient. In the book, Trouble by Gary D. Schmidt, Henry loses his brother, Franklin. But, Henry is able to stay in control of the things going on in his life. He has a plan of what he wants to do; climb Katahdin. He is also able to forgive in order to heal, and he is able to maintain healthy relationships with his friends and family. Chay, a Cambodian refugee who supposedly hit Henry’s brother, is not as resilient and does not have a plan. Chay does not forgive and does not have any relationships whatsoever. Henry demonstrates more resilience than Chay because he has control over his life, maintains relationships and forgives Chay.

In my view resilience can sometime be brought on by an emotional event and helps you with self-confidence. Additionally, I feel that resilience means that one can expect things that can happen in a process and can adjust accordingly to the situation at hand. My example of resilience was demonstrated in this TED talk video “My Escape from North Korea” by Hyeonseo Lee, she discusses her life in North Korea and how everything was transparent to her in North Korea as she was growing up until the age of seven.

What does resilience really mean to you? The literal definition to resilience is the ability to cope with problems and setbacks. In the story Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, she shows us all different kind of ways that the characters in her story used the skills that Kendra Cherry was talking about, to help them out of every situation. In this story it shows how certain situations affect people in different ways and how each person goes through seven skills. The characteristic that Louie undergoes is the skill of Strong Problem-Solving. The Strong Problem-solving skill is when a crisis emerges, people are able to spot the solution that will lead to a safe out-come. However, if you are not a non-resilient person you sometimes develop tunnel vision, which basically mean that you fail to notice important details or take advantages of oppurtunities.

Resilience, as a specific strategy that individuals usually apply when they face a kind of adverse situation (Castro, et al., 2010), has been attracted a lot of attention among researchers. Resilience as a developmental attribute seems necessary for teachers to be more confident and successful in their teaching. More

I like reading Anna Harrington’s readings about resilience and how it defines a person in how they strive and overcome challenges and obstacles that come their way in this world. People with resilience as I would see would be looked as “survivors” unlike those people without resilience tend not to make it in this ever-changing world we live in. I can relate this article to my life being born and raised in Chicago, Illinois to going off into the U.S. Army with multiple of combat deployments during the Iraq war, my time spent in law enforcement agency/legal government sector and to where I am at now.

Downey, C. A., Chang, E. C., Hirsch, J. K., & Lin, N. J. (2016). Challenges and prospects for positive psychology research, theory, assessment, and practice in a multiracial and multiethnic world. In E. C. Chang, C. A. Downey, J. K. Hirsch, N. J. Lin, E. C. Chang, C. A. Downey, ... N. J. Lin (Eds.), Positive psychology in racial and ethnic groups: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 307-321). Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/14799-015

In 1991 Norman Garmezy developed a theoretical framework for resiliency. Garmezy (1991) proposed three types of protective factors that make up his theoretical framework, which includes individual characteristics of the individual, a close-knit relationship with the family and lastly, social support and structure outside their immediate family. The primary factor in developing resiliency relates to the person's intelligence and character, and Garmezy (1991) states that resilient youth have above average intelligence. Garmezy (1991) defines the second factor in developing resiliency as one that includes the support of family to help with difficult conditions. The third common factor of resilient youth is external support from institutions (Garmezy, 1991). According to Masten (2001) “resiliency refers to a class of phenomena characterized by good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development” (p. 228). Garmezy (1991) considers the intelligence level of an individual and ability to possess the mind power to tackle an adverse situation as one pleases as the core characteristics of a resilient individual. Garmezy (1991) resiliency framework allows student affairs professionals is to examine the strengths of disadvantaged students who are faced with various life stressors, but

Despite experiencing an adverse environment during development, people have the potential to become healthy individuals in the psychosocial sense of the word (Duncan et al, 2003). Erikson does not refer much to the resilience of humans in his theory, except to state that people can go back and positively resolve stages that were previously negatively actualized. (Louw et al, 1999). An example of human resilience would be, despite many South Africans having lived with political, racial and educational oppression from childhood, some of them have risen above their circumstances, educated themselves and gone on to lead successful lives financially, socially and emotionally as adults (Jordaan & Jordaan, 1998). As quoted in Freeman's article "The fact that so many people have managed to survive abominable circumstances is, as Straker et al. (1992) put it, 'a tribute to the human spirit's capacity to deal with adversity'"(1993, p.158). Therefore, human resilience is important when applied to the South African context, however has limited presence in Erikson's