Mental Health

As you can see by the title, today’s post is about mental health. I would like to start by apologising for how fragmented this post may seem to you as you read it but as I write today, I have with me no plan or end goal, no audience or person in mind to speak to and no clarity in my own thoughts. Instead, I want to be honest, unfiltered and open about this issue as it sits very close to home for me.

 

My own mental health began to deteriorate noticeably around the age of twelve. I had just finished my first year of secondary school and the changes I was going through in life, with my reluctance to seek help meant that I spiraled. I began to focus less on school, developed anxieties around every aspect of my life, stopped taking care of myself, and became reclusive. I found myself alone, depressed and hurt with no one to talk to but myself. At this point I’m sure you may be expecting a ‘but I changed my life’ or ‘now I find myself in perfect conditions’, however not a great deal has changed. My life isn’t terrible but I know the trials and tribulations that I had to go through have affected my life since the age of twelve greatly enough to ripple through my life today. My anxieties still exist and whilst I am able to rationalise with myself more than before, I find myself at times feeling like the twelve-year-old with no one to speak to. 

 

My life isn’t however all sadness and heartbreak. I am generally in a much better place than I was before and although relapses and outbursts do occur once in a blue moon, the road to conquer my demons is one that continues. Today’s post isn’t about that journey, although maybe one day I might share my own course of action. Instead, I want to speak about mental health within my community. I want to speak about some of the hindrances and issues I, as well as many I know, face when dealing with their mental health and some of our traditions/habits that act as a barricade rather than a bridge.

 

Comparison

 

The first toxic trait I’ve seen in my own journey with mental health is the habit a lot of people have of comparing. Comparison in the Asian community comes as no surprise as we see it manifest in many ways. From buying new cars to compete with neighbors to buy the most extravagant gifts at weddings, the ideology of a lot of Asians is to compare and compete with others. However, it was only on my own journey through mental health that I realised that the comparisons didn’t stop there. Instead, I saw that this need to exceed standards set by others extended to suffering. There was a need to show that the suffering faced by them was greater than the suffering faced by me.

 

My first encounter with this issue was when, upon telling a family member about my mental health, I was barraged with a long list of issues they themselves had faced at my age. ‘When I was your age I had to open the shop at six in the morning, I was paid five pounds a week, my dad was never around, my mum didn’t really know what was happening and I also had the pressure of school on my head’ is what I was told back then. The response was heart-breaking and even thinking back on it now I feel ashamed that this ideology continues to be perpetuated by my community. 

 

The ideology at play here is that of saying ‘the suffering faced by you simply isn’t the same as what was/is being faced by me’. The comparison of who has the bigger wedding gift now applies to this too where someone who suffers less suddenly doesn’t matter because someone may be suffering more or portray there suffering as such.

 

Why would I ever confide in you if all I expect to hear in return are comparisons? Why would I bring a gift to the wedding if it's going to be belittled by you? Why would I want to be around people if all they want to do is compare? Comparing is fine when you think you’re winning but you only realise the toxicity of this trait when your life is reduced to the comparison. It's funny to see this especially with the younger generation where the iPads, iPhones and ‘easy’ lifestyle are made out to be support systems. The older generation repeats the rhetoric of ‘if you have an iPhone and an education, you can't really complain to someone like me who had none of the above’. But by saying this you’re being ignorant, you’re discrediting the issues unique to one generation because they weren’t encountered by yours. So the next time you’re sitting around discussing the unfortunate end of a friend of the family, the struggles they faced before they passed, stop and realise that they too had an iPhone but it's because of these comparisons that they couldn’t reach out.

 

Appearances

 

Nowadays my life has fewer downs than it used to. I have more friends, a good support system with my nearest and dearest and the opportunity to write and express myself in different ways. But, like I mentioned before, the journey of mental health is seldom linear and so my ups and downs are often sporadic and there isn’t a routine I use to identify my struggles or triggers that I can be cautious of. Therefore my mental health isn’t reducible to certain graphs, patterns, or blueprints.

 

Yet it seems in my experience, as well as those of other people who I have reached out to throughout the duration of my research on this topic, that there is a stigma used to portray mental health struggles. Adopted from movies and other forms of exaggerated media, the idea embedded into a lot of people when they look at mental health is to assume a ‘good day’ suddenly means the cure of the issue as a whole. The idea of mental health is then suddenly what we see in movies, a person manic with issues and who falls into pain and more pain with no recovery. This is an issue that is perhaps manifested in a number of ways. As I mentioned before, media outlets oftentimes show the worst-case scenarios for a lot of the issues faced by normal people and because of the length of media they portray, as well as their intention to place gravitas on certain issues, the end result is this linear motion of mental health. However, I feel as though the issue isn’t contained in just this ideology. I think that there is an aspect of escapism involved in a lot of the reactions that people in the community have to these issues. It's the same idea a lot of us have with children when they fall; the initial cry scares us and we do all that we can to mend the issue enough that the child doesn’t cry, even though the pain may still be present. We perhaps are so frightened of mental health as a concept that it becomes easier to see someone’s laughter for a day as a cure as opposed to a momentary lapse in a long journey to recovery.

 

The appearances that one sees at face values are often fake, made up to adhere to ‘the right thing to do’ and because being sad isn’t an emotion people want to feel. In my own journey, the suppression of my sadness came because of the position I have in my family, the importance of my ‘being okay’ to the functioning of those close to me and because it was easier to smile and say ‘I’m okay’ than to confront my own issues. I remember a week before one of my worst patches of mental health issues, I was approached by a family member complaining that I wasn’t being ‘a good sport’ at family gatherings and that my actions were ‘bringing the mood down’. The night before I went through one of the worst fits I ever have been through, the same family member came up to me to ask if I was okay and it was because I knew a fake smile would make them think everything was cured that I walked away with a smile, saying ‘I’m okay’. That night could’ve been my last, it could have been the time that I walked away for the last time. I was lucky that I could rationalise with myself and stop an irreversible action. But imagine the number of people who couldn’t rationalise. The number of suicides you’ve heard of in which the person being spoken about was referred to as being ‘fine’ because they ‘had a smile on his/her face the last time I saw them’.

 

One day of happiness doesn’t take away from the sadness within. Just because the sun is shining doesn’t mean that the clouds aren’t lurking behind. Just because someone says they’re okay doesn’t mean that they are. Appearances can be true and most of the time when someone tells you they’re doing well, they probably are. But don’t be sorry, be safe, allow them to speak, look them in their eyes and recognise the mask that they may be wearing.

 

Strength

 

When a child speaks, it's applauded. But when the same child cries, it's seen as an issue. When a child falls over and breaks a leg, it's told ‘you’ll be fine, it's nothing to worry about’. But when the same child tells you they feel mentally unwell, they’re told to hide the pain or that ‘it's all in your mind’.

 

I really don’t understand why. Why is that the case? Why is it that crying is seen as bad? We literally come into this world with tears and by crying. We use this same noise to communicate until we learn a language. We have tear ducts that produce the liquid running down our cheeks when we cry. But it's demonised as if it's problematic for some reason. The correlation between strength and tears has somehow been implanted into people but I can't quite understand why.  The same question applies to the concept of mental health as a whole. How can we justify seeing mental health as some ailment that we ought to hide but normalise, sometimes even glorify, the physical ailments we may have. A broken bone is seen as normal, and sometimes a sign of bravery, for almost all cultures yet the mind’s struggles, the emotions that dictate our lives and their effect on us is constantly held down and seen as troublesome.

 

Maybe this is a pathological reaction or some sort of issue in which, because the area affected isn’t exposed to the naked eye, there is fear in dealing with it. Yet in this short section, all I ask is that you stop scrutinising people for their mental health. Stop telling people not to cry and instead console them so they won’t have to. Accept that you can't fix everything and instead of trying to impose weakness on the person suffering, accept your own shortcomings and fix them. If you can send your loved one to the doctor for a cold, you can send them to therapy for mental health struggles. Don’t let the obsession with weakness define you. 

 

Blame

 

I think for the most part people avoid blame. There is something about saying that ‘I was wrong’ that is intrinsically deterring for people in general. Whether we’re at work and the boss asks who’s fault something was or if you’ve left the toilet seat up at home, there is a feeling about taking blame that we just don’t like. However, why is it then that the mental health conversation provokes so many people to take the blame?

 

A member of my family, for instance, told his mum about his mental health struggles. He explained that he felt anxious at home because of how the house was set up. He assured her that these issues come from his own mental health and not a reflection of the household or her. Yet he was met with a reaction that exasperated the situation. The need to place blame set in. First, there was the insistence that it was her fault that he felt like that and after hours of conversation and convincing, she conceded that it was an issue he faced outside of the home. Yet the probing didn’t stop there. A systematic and somewhat interrogative style of questioning followed where the mum went through family members, friends and experiences that could be blamed. This went on for hours and eventually he conceded that in fact his reaction was misplaced and that he was indeed fine with no need for any change. This family member now has moved away from home and is quite reclusive from the family as a whole.

 

This experience and story really did teach me, as well as a highlight for me, instantiations where this may have happed with me. Times where I acted like the mum and times that I felt like the son. I then realised the factors truly at play here. This whole scenario wasn’t actually a means of taking blame like I may have suggested earlier, it wasn’t at all out of character for any human. Instead, this whole concept of taking the blame was a play for vindication. It's a tactic to free yourself of blame by playing into the emotions of the other. It's playing to another trait of a lot of people, the trait of passivity instead of directness. The person speaking, who may want to indicate certain traits of your own that they don’t like are now faced with a dilemma of being direct with you or passively avoiding the confrontation that awaits.

 

This habit needs to be stopped too. I get that the natural reaction to most actions is to find blame or a cause as such. However, the inhibition of conversation is a price too dear to pay for the blame game. Taking the blame for the ulterior motive of vindication is emotional abuse on your part and even if this isn’t the reason, confrontation to someone vulnerable can seem like a tonne of bricks on their back. The truth is that blame doesn’t need to be placed as a matter of urgency, instead, the wellbeing of the person feeling that way ought to be prioritised. If they can identify a cause then that’s great and an amazing place to start from. However, taking the cause personally is ultimately something that hinders your growth as well as their recovery. Instead, let the person speaking you vent and clarify their thoughts instead of probing them for a specific reason or thought for your own satisfaction. Healing is a process with mental health and clarity is seldom found in the same way as a physical injury, the culprit sometimes isn’t found and that’s okay as long as the person suffering is okay.

 

Judgement

 

This last section is a conglomeration of the rest and should be pretty clear if you’ve read so far. The girl who has a boyfriend at school and gets into some trouble won’t be able to speak to you if a judgement is what awaits her. The boy who’s seen as the funny one in a friendship group won’t speak to you if his lack of jokes one day is seen as moodiness and mocked. The pain you face is unique and comparing yourself to others doesn’t do you good or them. You don’t ever truly realise what someone else is going through so don’t view them as anything but human. Forget religion, creed, race, gender, social standing and anything we apply to humans when you look at them. Look at them as someone who is going through something, just a human. You don’t need to be a hero and fix their problems but please don’t add to them either.