Mental health refers to our cognitive, behavioral, and emotional wellbeing. It is all about how we think, feel, and behave. Having good mental health helps to lead a relatively happy and healthy life. It helps to demonstrate resilience and the ability to cope in the face of life’s adversities. The term ‘Mental Health’ is sometimes also used to refer to the absence of a mental disorder.
Mental health can affect daily life, relationships, and even physical health. It also includes a person’s ability to enjoy life – to attain a balance between life activities and efforts to achieve psychological resilience. Many of us are unaware of why we need to equally take care of our mental health along with physical health. Our state of mind controls our emotions, feelings, enthusiasm and all that we do. It is so important to be mindful of our mental states just the way we are for our physical health.
If there is depression, then there must be a breakup, If you have to go to a physiologist or a psychiatrist, you must be crazy. And a number of things that stop us from improving and working for our mental health. Today, we need to know the importance of mental health and all the states of mind and diseases related to it. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, hormonal imbalance and many other ailments are all related to and dependent on the state of our mind. There needs not to be a specific cause or even a cause for all these. We need to accept that just like we suffer fever, jaundice or any other disease, we suffer from mental illnesses too. And that’s quite normal. Even though an estimated 1 in 5 adults experience a mental illness at any given time, only about 40 percent seek treatment. And those who do seek treatment often wait a decade or more to get help.
Mental illness is treatable. But before we can support people in getting help, we need to address the misconceptions about mental illness that often prevent people from getting help.
Mental Illness is misunderstood. We’ve made gains in our understanding of mental illness over the past few decades. We’ve also made huge strides in treating mental illness with therapy, medication, and other supportive services. Even today, mental illness in our society is treated with a negative stigma and misconceptions, and it needs to stop. We as humans in general care for those with physical illness in ways that we wouldn’t even think to do so when faced with a person with a mental illness. We help the person receive treatment, we help care for them, are a friend to talk to, and above all, we treat their illness with the respect, seriousness, and legitimacy that it deserves. Why then do we not give the same level of care to those with mental illness?
Many times people with mental illness are viewed as lazy, lacking willpower or possibly worst of all that they chose to feel that way. Furthermore, people tend to give inappropriate advice to those suffering from mental illness.
The best way to understand someone’s mental health problem is to talk to them
I think it’s key to talk and create an open discussion on mental health. I believe it should be treated in the exact same way that physical health is treated. We will very likely have either been affected or know someone close to us who is suffering from mental health issues, and it’s a very serious problem. Suicide is the number one reason for male deaths under the age of 45, which is terrifying. It’s hard to tell if a person is depressed unless they break down in front of you or manage to tell you themselves. Depression doesn’t leave scars, not always. And it’s hard to say how bad it is if you can’t see the wound.
If you know someone who’s going through a difficult time, if you have even the slightest doubt, reach out. When we think of stigma and mental health, we tend to think of hurtful societal reactions and prejudice based on negative stereotypes. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Those with mental health problems also frequently suffer from self-stigma. This is where a person takes on wider social prejudices about mental illness, internalizes them, starts to believe and incorporate them into their self-image.
Mental health is important. We all know some days are good and some days are bad but we need to understand that it is these highs and lows are what life is all about. We should be mindful of our destructive thought patterns and keep a check on our loved ones as well. We should let them know that they are not alone. On a collective level, we need to get rid of the stereotypes that have clogged our perception of mental health for so long.
Let’s make a pledge to be a catalyst for positive change in this realm.
The writer is a 16-year-old student who is working to raise awareness on Mental Health