Let's Talk About: Mental Health
01 Nov 2020Hi!
This is the first post of (hopefully) a long series, Let’s Talk About, which are shorter posts about things that’ve happened to me over the past week. These are mostly going to be lightly edited, dictated rants that my computer has converted from speech into text. Enjoy!
This week, I’d like to discuss mental health, the need for a more honest conversation, and what you can do to help.
First off, I’d like to state that I am no expert on mental health. I know nothing about the field, other than what I’ve read and observed. If you do notice something that is factually incorrect, then please do email me at hello@thiswebsiteisnotaffiliatedwith.warwick.university. I’d also love your feedback.
Although there’s been a lot more discussion about mental health as of late, I feel like there hasn’t been enough emphasis on how we can help one another to take care of our mental health and how small things do we can have big impacts. For the past nine months, I’ve been working at a small, unincorporated charity called MyMind, which helps to connect people to trained volunteers through voice, video, or text chat.
MyMind isn’t designed to replace a trained therapist, or a service for people who are in crisis and who need immediate assistance. It’s designed to get people speaking to one another, and to avoid mental health problems by reflecting on thoughts and feelings.
Your mental health is just as important, if not more important, than your physical well-being. Yet, we treat it like this abstract concept, this thing that you either have, or you don’t. You’ve either got your shit together, or you’ve completely lost it. I feel this is the wrong approach to mental health.
I also feel like most of the discomfort that comes with speaking about mental health comes from a place of “If this person is struggling, what exactly do I do?” I get that.
If you’ve got a friend who has a cut, or a scrape, or they’ve sprained their ankle, well, you know exactly what to do. I need to clean the cut and put a plaster on it, they need to bandage that ankle with ice.
When it comes to mental health, it’s the opposite. We don’t necessarily know what to do. What exactly do you say to somebody who is depressed? What exactly do you say to somebody who is in crisis? What do you do to help somebody cope with paranoid delusions, or schizophrenia, or a manic episode?
I feel we aren’t necessarily as well educated on mental health, primarily because it’s not as intuitive as physical health. Physical health you can see and feel, mental health you can’t.
We need to have a conversation about solutions. Mental health is inextricably linked to physical health. If you don’t eat properly then that affects your mood, and if you don’t take care of your mental health, that, in turn, affects your physical health.
Mathematics is abstract, but we have people who can get on stage and who can, in half an hour, introduce you to some of the most amazing topics and tie them into everyday life, and we need something like that for mental health. With mental health, a possible solution could be mental health educators to help us understand how exactly we can cope with our own mental health, and also help people who may not be doing so well.
Empowerment in healthcare is becoming more and more common. Doctors are now focussed on prevention, rather than cure. Mental health definitely needs more of that. We made great strides in that direction over the past few years and that definitely needs to continue. Education, especially in early age is key. Mental health should be introduced into primary and secondary school curriculum, because we need to teach young people that their mental health, and the mental health of their friends, is important.
It’s also important to engage with mental health advice when it’s provided, just as it’s important to clean and re-apply a bandage when it gets dirty or stick a new plaster on when the old one falls off. Early education can help us realise that we need to continually take care of our mental health, just like you need to brush your teeth every day, and stay active, and eat healthily.
Eliminating the stigma around mental health can also be achieved by stepping back and not being dismissive or judgemental of peoples behaviours. Someone who comes across as needy or constantly requiring validation could be suffering from paranoid delusions during an episode of psychosis. They may feel like they’re being watched, they’re being gossiped about, they’re being excluded, they’re being targeted, and so they’re looking for some sign that this web that entangles them isn’t real.
Everyone is going through something, and it’s important to speak to one another instead of simply coming to conclusions that are wrong, damaging and inaccurate.
Stay safe, and look out for one another.