Mental Health Awareness!

Mental health awareness is one of the things I’ve been learning about the last several years, and I want to share my experiences.

First of all, What is Mental Health and Mental Illness? Mental health is our overall emotional and psychological well-being. It’s like our physical health, if one thing hurts, our entire body is affected, even if we don’t really feel it. Likewise, when our mental health isn’t where it should be, it can affect a lot more of our life than you might think.

Mental Illness on the other hand, are conditions that affect how we think and feel, it affects our moods and behaviors, and it honestly affects your ability to relate to others and function on a daily basis. Let me reiterate: on a Daily Basis. I’m not talking about this topics just ’cause it’s a good cause, but because I deal with this myself. Every day. It’s difficult. Example mental illnesses include (but aren’t limited to) depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar, and schizophrenia to name the biggest ones.

Here’s the thing, though. Depression and anxiety affect your Daily Life. They really do. Depression makes it hard to be or feel happy, sometimes it manifests as things you love doing feeling boring or unenticing. Depression can make you think you’re not worth anything, that you’d be better off dead, that you’re not important enough to ask for help when you need it because you don’t want to be a bother. Anxiety makes you worry, gets you stuck thinking about possible scenarios, makes you feel like bees are in your head while your brain screams, makes you think constantly about worse case scenarios and what if’s and there’s an added thing to depression and anxiety called Executive Dysfunction.

This particular lovely condition makes it hard to do things. Like, you can want to do a thing, like wash the dishes, but you cant just up and do the dishes. I’ve heard it described best like this: Neurotypical people (those who aren’t suffering from depression and anxiety, etc) if they need to do the dishes, they have a button that they mentally press and they can wash the dishes! Just like that. But the neurodivergent people like me, we either don’t have that button (until something happens and we suddenly do have the button, like a family member getting home) or the button is under a locked cover, and the key is missing. Sometimes we can find the key (maybe motivating ourselves with ice cream if we do the dishes, or get help from someone) and sometimes the key is just lost.

More on this tomorrow!