Mental Health Needs to Be More Than Just a Conversation
Mental health is an important conversation. Yes, it is important to talk about mental health and mental issues. However, I feel we need to start becoming more aware about mental health being more than just a conversation. There is so much work that still needs to be done!
I have mentioned this once or twice before, but it really landed when I saw PJ Gallagher appearing on The Late Late Show in Ireland to talk about his experience with mental illness.
YES!! That is how I have felt for so long! We almost default to the response of, “talk to someone” when we discuss mental health. Like I said at the start of this blog, that is great. Talking to people is great and we absolutely should have these conversations.
But what about when you are at the point where you feel mentally ill. You feel ill to the point where you don’t need to talk but need 24 hour care. You are ill to the point where you are harming yourself, suicide may be an option or you are struggling to get out of bed every morning. You feel nothing but depression and sadness…we don’t talk about that nearly as much.
Mental Health and Mental Illness
Part of the problem stems from the confusion around “mental health” and “mental illness”. They are increasingly being used as if they mean the same thing, however they don’t mean the same thing at all. We all have mental health but not all of us experience a mental illness. When we talk about mental health we are referring to feelings and emotions.
Mental illness is an illness which affects the way people think, feel or behave with others. There are a massive range of mental illnesses which impact how people live their lives every day. The two terms are not the same thing but increasingly we are talking about them as if they are the same.
Working on yourself
Talking about mental health or a mental illness is a complex conversation. There is no black and white and it is scary. Many of us won’t put an enormous amount of time and effort into working on ourselves because it is painful. It isn’t all roses and sunshine and it means coming to terms with a lot of painful stuff as well as good things too. But by the same token, people are happy to dish out advice to others like it is going out of style.
One of the reasons I absolutely hate life coaches! People who are life coaches have done around a six month course if even that. Yet they are prepared to go out and offer people advice on what kind of decisions to make and how to live. They are people who are too lazy to put the time in to work on themselves before helping anyone else.
You don’t need to go out and strip everything bare and peel all the layers of your life back if you don’t want to. That isn’t necessary for everyone and it isn’t going to be for everyone. But when you start coming out the other side — the feeling is amazing.
What is more than just talking?
This isn’t an easy one to answer but if we say that we need to do more than talk about mental health, what does that actually mean? Well the basics — more funding, more resources, more therapists, more counsellors…you get the idea.
As someone who has experienced the mental health system and who has been diagnosed with a mental illness, I can tell you now it is lots of waiting lists. Everything around the system right now works off a waiting list. Whether you need a therapist, a psychologist appointment…no matter what it may be — there are waiting lists. The demand just massively outweighs the support available. If a service has to turn someone away due to capacity, it is unlikely that person will seek help again in the future.
There is no short term solution to that, but we also need to work on continuing to reduce the stigma around mental illness. There has been a lot of progress in recent years, people are more open to talking about mental health too as well as mental illness. However, there is still much stigma attached to things such as psychiatric admissions.
Some of what is happening right now feels too pedestrian. Going through the motions and ticking a box. Just recently I sat in a powerpoint presentation in work listing all the work placed causes of stress. But no real solutions to those problems, no plan of action, no details of the support and no guidance on what to do if you are suffering with that stress. A mere box ticking exercise to say it has been covered by the company.
Education and talking are great, but we just need to make sure that we don’t slip into the habit of making the talk around mental health and mental illness little more than routine.
