YOU AND YOUR MENTAL HEALTH

I noticed how easy it is to misunderstand mental health illnesses if we don’t have a clear meaning of what mental health is.

All of us have mental health as we do physical health. A mental health illness is similar to having a physical health illness except that with mental health illness, you FEEL the pain but cannot see it. This makes it mentally distressing to bear and explains the extreme some people might go in order to feel relieved.

This difference also contributes to its stigmatization and the difficulty with accepting the challenges that come with it.

Imagine someone going through excruciating mental pain from deep sadness but is assumed to be lying about it. Because it cannot be seen, it is so easy to think they might be faking it.

I used to think people lied more about being alright until I entered the mental health space and realized many people are victims of such wrong assumptions about faking their own mental health issues.

Mental health is primarily about how we THINK, FEEL and ACT. This means it is the part of our health concerned with emotional, social and psychological wellbeing.

Anything that affects how we think can affect our mental health.

If a situation impacts us negatively, and causes us to have some distorted views or beliefs about ourselves, it means it has the possibility to affect our mental health negatively. This can cause mental health illness.

This is why traumatic situations have a direct impact on our mental health.

Trauma is any disturbing experience that causes us some levels of distress. There are no more traumatic events than another; the impact of an event on the individual is dependent on many factors: some of which are; window of tolerance of the individual, family background, personality, environmental factor and access to mental health care.

It is important to note that we cannot measure the direct impact a traumatic event had on any individual based on our assumption of how little or big it is. Some people are often discriminated against by assuming their own event isn’t as horrible as another’s and therefore not affect them as they claimed. An assumption like this shows we haven’t taken the time to check the individual’s background and other factors to determine the level of impact they might have had from the seeming “small” event.

Our mental health is mostly affected by what happens to us throughout our lifespan, mostly at the earlier stages of our developmental phases because of how it affects the eventual development of the brain.

This means that trauma can make you more predisposed to developing mental health problems, as well as make it harder to manage difficult circumstances since trauma can affect how you think, feel and act.

On the other hand, having an early good start to life with proper care and nurturing can also be a good foundation to having an optimal mental health, as well as contributing to the resilience to bounce back well after a traumatic event.

Any life event such as a job loss, heart break, accidents, physical illness, death of loved ones, etc., at any particular time in our lives can contribute to developing mental health problems.

In my experience as a healing guide, I’ve observed that many mental health issues that society labels illnesses have their roots in the way the individual chose to cope during the distress. Some are the development of distorted coping mechanisms during a traumatic time. For instance, some people cut themselves when they are experiencing a difficult emotion in order to self-regulate themselves. It’s like they cut their bodies physically with a razor or small knife in order to see proof of the mental pain. Over time, they could be labelled as being borderline; whereas the cut was a way to cope with the excruciating unseen mental distress.

I am not saying it is a false diagnosis to have these medical terms. I am sharing from the experiences I’ve witnessed and seen. Perhaps teaching everyone how to regulate in a more healthy way may help us prevent many future mental health issues.

I believe if we can learn better ways to remain grounded when having a hard time or some unpleasant emotions, we might learn preventive ways to manage possible mental health challenges in the future.

The same applies to children. If we can help a child learn to regulate themselves during stressful moments rather than shutting them off from crying or being expressive about their pain, maybe, we might be showing them in practical terms how to have better coping skills that can help them feel better and widen their window of tolerance.

As we mark mental health day on October 10th, I hope more of us will see that we are all affected by mental health and should take it more seriously, beginning with reducing the labels and stigmatization we place on those who come out about their mental health challenges.

Perhaps, as we come to an understanding about how the thinking-feeling loop affects our behaviours and overall well-being, maybe we can put in efforts in the way we think about ourselves and the situations that happen to us.

By now you would have seen that by holding on to recurring negative thoughts about yourself or the unpleasant event, you’re likely to feel more negative. This feeling will affect your physiology and behaviour. Both of which will directly impact your mental health.

It is much like the placebo-nacebo effects. Positive thoughts invoke positive feelings and vice versa.

We can do better with our mental wellness when we learn how to manage the negative situations without ignoring the resultant negative feelings while not also taking up a permanent negative stand for a temporary event that happened to us.

You are not what happened to you, even though what happened to you may be the reason you are the way you are now.

We can experience a supposedly negative event without becoming fused with the experience. This takes time to master, yet doable.

I’d conclude by saying that we are not as helpless about the state of our mental health as we’ve assumed. We only need to understand what it entails.

Like most things, prevention is better than cure with mental health.

Best wishes for your mental health!

?Joy Iseki

Your Healing Partner