A few years ago when I started openly discussing my own mental health issues, it was out of complete irritation that I felt like I needed to only talk about it in hushed tones to people that I really trusted. Dealing with my mental health issues made me feel less than, but the social stigma that accompanied them made me feel even worse, and at that time I didn’t need any help feeling bad about myself. I was tired of people dumbing down the impact of my anxiety to “just being nervous” or my depression to “just being sad” and implicitly or explicitly telling me to get over it. This was all difficult enough to deal with as a human, and when you added in the fact that I was an educator, it felt like it multiplied the necessity for secrecy by a million.
Or at least I thought. Until I started talking about it and others like me who were lurking in the shadows started whispering same here. That’s when I knew we needed to talk about it more, and here are five of the many, many reasons why.
You’re Not Alone For me, one of the hallmarks of my mental health issues is to feel like I am all alone in whatever adversity I’m facing or in my feelings toward myself and others. That aloneness led me to believe that nobody understood me, and if I wasn’t careful I would wallow in that feeling. However, since making it my mission to talk about mental health issues more, I have said things like, “I have gone through my day with a smile on my face and gone back to my office at the end and cried because of the effort and sheer exhaustion I felt from acting normal when all I wanted to do was crawl into bed and not get out” and I have had people say to me, “Oh my gosh. Me, too.” And inevitably someone says, “I always feel like I’m the only one who feels this way. Everyone else seems so happy.” But, they’re not alone. My counselor told me once that if I was in a mall and all the people with anxiety had yellow shirts and all the people with depression had red shirts and all the mentally healthy people had white, there would be almost no white shirts. And that doesn’t take into account the multitude of other mental health issues. It baffles me how we can be so quick to judge an issues that are so prevalent.
One of the reasons I believe that people can feel alone even if they know that others may have the same mental health issue is because the way that we cope with symptoms or the way that symptoms present themselves may be different. For example, although I get on with my days, some people may need to spend time in bed during severe depression episodes. I have anxiety which can manifest itself in many different ways. Sometimes it is combined with fear and makes me not want to move forward. Sometimes it is an all-out panic attack where I shake and feel like I can’t stand or I black out or I feel like I’m going to pass out and sometimes I do, and sometimes there could be a trigger that just happened or it could have been from the day before and then there could be five different coping mechanisms that I need to try before it subsides. And all of that can happen in five minutes or eight hours. After each episode, I need to be willing and able to reflect and process on what just made the anxiety happen so I can better deal with it in the future. Constant reflection and adjustment. And because of that, because it feels sometimes that it is fluid, it’s difficult to ever feel on the same page as anyone else. But when I talk about it, there is always at least one other person who understands.
Destigmatization One of the reasons I felt like I couldn’t talk about it was because of the way that having a mental health issue is going to be viewed by some people, especially since I work in education. I once gave a session on educator mental health to a group of community members. Afterwards, one of the gentlemen came up to me and told me he was very uncomfortable with me using the term mental health issues. And herein lies the problem. We are ok with discussing diabetes or a broken limb or kidney stones, but when we are struggling with mental health issues it still feels uncomfortable to other people. But, this is exactly why it’s important to continue the discussion and educate people on what constitutes mental health and mental health issues and the impact it can have on a person’s day-to-day that nobody else may be able to see.
Misunderstandings and Misinformation In the area of mental health and mental illness the field of study is relatively new in comparison to many other fields of medical study, and there are still people who remember when we would put mentally ill patients into mental hospitals to keep them away from others. Because the field is so young, relatively speaking, there are still a lot of questions as to how things work (or don’t) and why people feel the way they do. We don’t really know, for example, why some people live with depression and some people get so depressed they take their lives. We don’t know why a child in a home who is abused may go forward abusing their own children while their sibling breaks the cycle and does not. We can’t predict why something is a trauma for one person but the same situation is not for another. There are still so many unknowns for science, it’s difficult for the general public to have the information. In the case of mental health issues misinformation can fuel the stigma and can contribute to people with mental health issues to feel alone and ostracized. Keeping ourselves educated and then educating others with what we DO know is the number one way we are going to help destigmatize mental health issues and clear up potential misunderstandings.
Responsibility We all have a responsibility to have a general idea of what to look for in someone who may be experiencing mental health issues. Even during the pandemic there have been multiple commercials reminding us to check on others and make sure that they are safe. I believe we can be stronger as a community when we recognize and support each other.
However, as a person with mental health issues I am also responsible for myself. I may not be the one who caused my trauma, but I am responsible for the healing. I am worthy of healing. And part of that is understanding my own issues and how I can cope and move forward. It is recognizing when I need to reach out to people I trust for help and not sit back and wallow in the fact that they may not be reaching out to me. It is my responsibility to get help when I recognize I need it. I have come far enough in my healing to accept that only I know how I truly feel and therefore I hold responsibility for asking for help.
When we discuss mental health issues and work to educate people and destigmatize it, it allows people dealing with the issues more capacity mentally to deal with healing instead of constantly wondering if they are going to be judged for whatever it is they’re going through. If we are willing to talk about it we may be willing to support it, and that may lead to someone choosing to reach out for the help they need.
This blog post is one of a series on Mental Health Awareness for May. Follow my blog to get special updates.