ON MENTAL HEALTH || Why You Shouldn't Let Mental Illness 'Run Its Course'
Mental health is a part of your overall health, and my approach is to take care of it as you would your physical health.
I recently had a conversation with a dear friend of mine who is faced with a mental health issue. They can feel themselves spiralling into depression, but yet experience a great deal of inertia when it comes to seeking professional help. After hearing their side of the story as to why they feel this way, I realized we often share the same questions and hesitations about working on our mental health.
Questions such as…
When do I need to go to a professional?
Why can’t I just work on our mental health myself?
I can’t see or evaluate any concrete results after my treatments with a mental health professional, so how I even confirm that it’s working?
A lot of these questions would seem absurd if applied to issues of our physical health. You would go to a doctor if you can’t stop coughing for weeks, or if you have a bodily injury that requires stitches; physical issues are much more obvious to identify than mental ones.
In a similar vein, you wouldn’t attempt to stitch up your own wound, or to stop internal bleeding yourself, would you? With a physical issue, like a fever or cold, you can see and feel the medicine working when the symptoms subside, but issues of the mind often take a much longer time to discover, treat, and mend.
Some people try to seek help from their significant other or friends and family, but the truth is, we are not equipped with the right skill set to treat, let alone diagnose, the situation and proper approach. This is what happened in the case of my friend, who sought my help. We spent hours talking through the reasons why they were feeling this way and what steps they believed they would need to take to ‘get out of their rut’.
Sometimes when dealing with mental health issues, people choose to close the doors to treatment because of fears they cannot find the words to describe.
There were numerous points during the situation where I felt the doors to their mind were closed; they would repeatedly state that ‘they don’t know [if this is a good course of action]” or “they can’t do it”. From my perspective, it felt as though they wanted to stay in this painful zone, that they felt like they deserved to stay in it. Again, because I lack the professional training to know the proper approach, I simply didn’t know how to open the doors to their mind.
I’ve had others in my life who dealt with mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, and it is not a ‘rut’, where you can simply sit back and let your body ‘do its own thing’. To compare this to an extreme case, would you let cancer sit inside your body and hope it ‘runs its course’ so you can return back to your normal life? Sometimes, we refer to it as a rut because we don’t have the words to describe it, we simply know and feel that something is wrong but we can’t put a finger on it. If this were the case of physical pain, most would opt to get the issue checked out, so why wouldn’t you do the same with mental ‘pain’?
Mental health issues, when left untreated, could also take a tremendous toll on the body. Twice in my life, I’ve dealt with extreme anxiety and stress, which resulted in weight loss of 15 to 20 pounds. I weigh about 110 pounds, so shedding 20 pounds left me looking and feeling like a bag of skin and bones. I knew it wasn’t normal, but I also didn’t believe at the time that mental health stressors could result in such a drastic impact on my health. I also, at the time, didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t describe what was wrong, and even though I knew the source of the stress, there was a part of me that felt obligated to stay in the situation that was causing it. In one case I sought professional help, in another, I was fortunate the source removed itself from my life.
If you are reading this and feel that seeing a mental health professional or discussing your mental health issues with someone is still taboo, or you can’t see how it will help you, then I want to ask, have you tried?
I’ve witnessed the vicious cycle of believing you don’t need, or aren’t worthy, of help; and how friends have continued to spiral further because of this belief. If there is someone in your life, or if you are struggling with mental health issues or personal trauma, I urge you to explore the tools out there tailored for your situation.
What I hope you will realize is that you don’t have to do it alone, that there is light at the end of the tunnel (or that there IS a tunnel to get out of the vicious cycle), and you are worthy of waking up to days where your mind feels at ease.
