How We Talk About Mental Health

*This post was supposed to be publish last week but was not released due to a technical issue. Sorry! It’s just me over here running this whole operation. We’ll be back to your regularly scheduled programming next week!

Today’s post is going to be a bit of a rant, but hopefully a helpful one. I have some concerns about the way we talk about mental health. At first I tried to see if anyone has written about this (because in today’s world most thoughts you have are already out there online somewhere). I’m sure there are other pieces out there, but this 2018 article from The Guardian touched on a lot of issues I have with the mental health conversation. While I’m so glad that mental health has become more of a mainstream discussion topic in recent years, because there is such a horrible stigma that prevents people from seeking the help they need, the way we talk about mental health seems to leave a lot of people out of the conversation.  It seems to me that a lot of online spaces (mainly on social media), focus on mental health for the average person who is mostly emotionally healthy, or for those that may have mental disorders but in more minor cases (please understand, I don’t want to minimize the important positive impact that these spaces can have, I myself engage with a lot of these spaces regularly). From my perspective, as someone who grew up around mental illness, it just seems to me like the conversation is too often limited to cases where mental health resources can be prettily packaged on Instagram and some aspects are glossed over. Anyone who knows someone with a mental illness (and statistically most of us do), knows that there are highs and lows, good days and bad days. While generic advice such as “eat well” and “exercise” (and I acknowledge the hypocrisy here of being someone who recommends those things all the time) can help, that’s just not enough for some people. When we talk about mental health we need to talk about the day-to-day but also how to get through the lowest points of these illnesses. No, we cannot all be trained mental health professionals and be expected to know how to handle someone in crisis. But we can talk more openly about how to support people around us who might be suffering. Too often in the lowest points of someone’s illness, those around them can pull away. It’s really the worst time you can pull away from someone but people do, whether it’s out of a fear or misunderstanding of the illness. This is why I think we need to shift some of the responsibility in these conversations. There’s a lot of messaging saying things like “reach out,” directed at those with a mental illness when the person with the mental illness is already struggling to show up for themselves, and it’s much easier if someone around them takes on the responsibility to reach out to them when they are struggling. I wish conversations around mental health encouraged a sense of collective responsibility where others are encouraged to look for signs someone might be struggling, and given some basic guidance on how to support them. The National Alliance on Mental Health (NAMI) has some great resources about how to help a person with a mental illness and how to help someone through a crisis. I feel more hopeful that this will be part of the conversations moving forward, because I think Gen Z is more comfortable talking openly about mental health. I hope that trend continues to grow in the future. I may circle back to this at some point and unpack these issues a bit more in the future, but I think this is a good summary of my thoughts for now. 

I’m going to leave you with these resources from the National Institute of Mental Health, including a list of crisis lines. 

Until next week,

Livvy