Can Frustration Be A Health Issue?

Have you ever wondered why there is an increase in the crime rate in Ghana? How about the reasons for the premature deaths of the youth (obituaries like: What a shock!, Gone too soon, Green leaf has fallen etc). Also how about the unthinkable dangers people knowingly apply themselves to in order to travel outside Ghana through the desert in order to seek greener pastures? Well, its due to a very underrated but serious health issue. FRUSTRATION!

What is Frustration?

Frustration is a feeling of disappointment and discomfort aroused in the mind of human beings only when something has gone wrong with them or they are not able to achieve the goals that they had set for themselves. In every ten people, seven are affected by it and out of the three are severely affected. It is a mental feeling that is growing like other dangerous diseases such as AIDS.

In today’s competitive scenario every person has his targets that he wanted to achieve timely and if he is not able to achieve his targets he is frustrated. This frustration can affect the mind in a negative way in which a person’s thinking power gets slowed down. Frustration led a person a take wrong decisions and as a result of which he is not able to come up with innovative ideas. His creativity gets stopped down. He is not able to achieve all his targets and is left with only his uncompleted plans and unachieved targets. Such a frustrated person goes far away from reality.

In psychology, frustration is a common emotional response to opposition, related to anger, annoyance, and disappointment, frustration arises from the perceived resistance to the fulfillment of an individual’s will or goal and is likely to increase when a will or goal is denied or blocked.

How this feeling of frustration does arise?

Firstly the feeling of frustration is aroused in human beings when they are not able to achieve the targets that they had set for themselves. Secondly, the feeling of frustration is aroused when they compare themselves with others and find that they are lacking behind while others had made a rapid progress but they had remained where they were earlier. This causes frustration in them. When the people misinterpret their capabilities and set those targets which are far away from their potentials. They just compare themselves with those who are more educated or are equipped with high potential or more resources and then set their target up to those levels where they factually could never reach. And then when they are not able to meet their targets they get frustrated.

It is the fact that everyone on this earth is not born with the same potential and have the same abilities and in the same area. If they misinterpret their functional area and start their career in line in which they are weak or the line which is not meant actually for them. Then this results in frustration on the condition of being not achieving the targets.

Example: Some people enjoy the post of CEO in reputed companies just because they are born in high society and rich family even though they are not that much talented while others although they are more qualified and talented struggles hard to acquire the middle-class jobs also. If a common man does not make effort to remove these types of social injustices then this led to frustration in them. The involvement of a large number of young persons in activities like sakawa or cyber fraud in Ghana and Nigeria is also an outcome of frustration.

So the recent hike in suicide in the young ones, as well as they developing chronic ailments like hypertension is as a result of frustration. Ghana is hard and this is making a lot of people frustrated and mentally unstable. The health authorities need to holistically approach healthcare as defined by the WHO.

As defined by World Health Organization (WHO), it is a “State of complete physical, MENTAL, and social well being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

So frustration is a health problem that needs urgent attention!